Gratitude

Eco art I created at Santa Monica Beach today!

Gratitude is an Attitude!

In Honor of my Dad

Every time I visit my Dad's house in Ozarks I feel I am on a sabbatical. I can breathe and center myself. Although, this time was very different my Dad is sick and we had to take him into the VA for some tests.

This image is piece a created after my healing run down to the lake. Honoring the place and my connection to it.

Earth Day 2010: Kelp Forest Shrine

I had an amazing Earth Day we camped on the coast, south of Big Sur at this magical treasure of a campsite called Kirk Creek




I was drawn to the portal, the doorway that had been formed in the rock... The energy of this place felt was akin to the Inca gate of the Sun in Machu Pucchu, Peru. The betwixt!!



I started creating a spiral with rocks close to the portal and as I looked around I saw a beautiful piece of kelp.I necklaced the kelp around the spiral. It is amazing how my shrines always go back to the tree or the forest. As kelp in the ocean is considered a forest.



I came to the conclusion that this place was hub of Jyoti(meaning light in Hindi)




On this trip I was also reading one of Deepak Chopra's books and here is what I embraced in an automatic and stream of consciousness way
New vision--new sense of self--generous of spirit-Devata--never ending creativity



awareness is the source of all of us--deeper vision--seeing differently!



To check out the Earth Day in D.C."Click Here". Shouldn't everyday be Earth Day?? We all need to embrace a new and deeper vision of what it means to be a human and to reconnect with our amazing mother called Earth!!

Art from the abyss

What creative hub!! This a landfill site on the Bay that has been transformed!!.




"Click Here" to read about the history of the Albany Bulb.

That is Awesome! Indian Rock Eucalyptus Tree Shrine

Stream of consciousness..

Today is my Birthday and of course I had to take a mental health day off from work! Lately I have been really inspired to create tree shrines again. This one was a marker or a rite of passage for my birthday/rebirth, as well as an offering to this sacred place called Indian Rock in Berkeley.

Over the last couple months I have been walking to the Rock at least three times a week to meditate and heal. Today I thought I would pay homage to this amazing place with some ART.

When I arrived to the rock there was three people on it. I was feeling a little timid as I do not like to create my tree shrines in the public view. I love people to discover them, but I hate being watched while I create them.So I decided to walk around the rock and try find a place to create a shrine in solitude. As I was looking around I was fascinated by the little caves that exist at the bottom of the rock. It gave the sense of being at the Temple of the Moon in Peru, which was so mystical and amazing!! I have been to Peru twice and I love it!!
The little caves is were I decided to create my internal shrine. At first it was just going to be a rock shrine and then when I was walking around I discovered this Eucalyptus tree seed that was blooming like a mandala. It was fantastic. I placed the seed in the center of my eco-art and it was activated into a tree shrine. As I spent time with there, documenting the shrine I felt very connected to the internal mother Earth. Much like how I felt while I sat within the Temple of the Moon cave at the base of Huayna Picchu.

After photo documenting my Eco-Art I decided to take the seed with me and to ascend up the rock, where I began to create another shrine.







As I was photography my work, I was startled by this young rock climber. He glided by me and he seemed to just appeared from no where. He sat a short distance away from me in meditation for awhile. The rock is really a destination for a lot of folks. At all times of the day you can find people just hanging out. In groups or many times alone.



Then two young girls climbed up the rock. They were really being silly and taking goofy pictures of themselves on the rock. I decided to leave.



As I was descending the rock the girls discovered my shrine. And they exclaimed wow this is awesome! wow that is awesome!
AWESOME!! and they started taking photo's of it. I smiled within! That is what I want this art to do.

To evoke reverence for nature!

Mayan Tree Shrine

Tulum Mexico is a Pre-Columbian walled city located on the Caribbean coast in Quintana Roo, Mexico.This is such a mystical and amazing place! It is paradise. We stayed at "Cabana Copal" in a quaint grass hut with a sand floor, literally steps away from the ocean. Outside our magical hut on the beach where we had nightly visits by an Iguana, that is were I created my tree Shrine.
Tulum
While creating this tree shrine my creative process seemed kind of fragile from my near arrest in Point Reyes, National Park,CA from creating the same art. From this state of being I choose the safe palm trees outside our hut to revere. For me the experience was kind of flat and filled with fear of being caught. I let the fear of being caught run the gamete. I actually destroyed the shrine quickly and made one from leaves and stones. But in reflection on an internal and metaphysical level I had an amazing experience.



This is a powerful and sacred place and I look forward to going back very soon and creating some amazing reverent art in paradise!

Sacred Sites in the Urban Jungle

Sacred Sites in downtown Oakland was an amazing collaboration with Lauren and my students from our workshop series at Art is Moving "CLICK HERE"
It was also an continuation of my own series of Eco Art, which I call "Tree Shrines," a site specific project that I want to take around the world.'CLICK HERE" to check out some of my sites.

For me this workshop class was about honoring the trees,that are killed and used by us. We had an amazing time as a class. We created art around dead trees, phone lines (telephone poles) that intrinsically connect all of us. The funny thing is my boyfriend suggested this a year ago as a joke. In translation I love honoring the dead.
Also, an important aspect of this project is the viewer. Cliche as it is "we want them to stop and smell the roses." or just to be conscious of their environment and how little things can make a big difference. As we were created these shrines many people who walked by were smiling! One homeless guy laughed and asked us if the steel pole Lauren and Patti were making into a tree would grow.
This project as a whole is the resurrection of panspsychism.

what does panspychism mean? "CLICK HERE"
For more research on this philosophy check out this amazing book from one of my professors at JFK Christen DeQuincy. He taught an amazing class called Paradigms of Consciousness. This book takes an in depth look at panspyschism Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter




Lauren and I will be doing a Eco-Trail in the Bay area this month. We will be making a call out to artists. If you want to join let us know. Also, our next workshop series will be starting soon. It is fun and inspiring. We invite all to join or drop in.
"CLICK HERE"

After this class, Sacred Sites in the Urban Jungle, I will never look at telephone poles the same way ever again.

Bringing the Tree into the Gallery

At my Final Exhibition I wanted to created an installation within the gallery and represent the site specific trees that I had created art around. To form a web of connection between the interior world and the exterior.

The spice and pigment Mandala that I created was over three feet in diameter. I used the same materials that I use in my site specific work. At the show my greatest nightmare was that someone would walk through this work. I had visions of it as my great friends and musician (Frogwater) for that evenings daughter was dying to plough through it. The opening was a blur...I do remember going to show one of my artist friends Nicole Chan the work and gasped as I approached the destroyed Mandala. An old man fest up to it and said he had walked through it. What a test...what a night to let go and to embrace the impermanence of it all. This work even in the natural world is really about impermanence, just like Tibetan sand paintings. It is gentle revaluation of the truth of our transitory existence.

The destruction of this piece gave me an opportunity to create a ritual piece for our ancestors. The time was Halloween or Samhien and perfect. I went in the next day and resurrected this work. With red puja powder from India and peacock feathers. I made a call for fellow artists to bring rocks to honor their ancestors and to place them around the activated shrine. To create a circle of stones surrounding the interior..


To be continued.. more to tell on this work
Still to this day it is a mystery who destroyed my shrine, my art... for some reason I do not think it was the old man who did it...Although tramutic it really made the piece more powerful

Salem, Witches, Haunted inns, the almighty dollar and "EARTH ART"

On July 7, 2008 I created my first East Coast shrine in Salem, Massachusetts the notorious place of the ‘burning times’ in U.S. This work was a memorial as well as a personal quest to foster reverence for the sacred feminine, which is the archetype of the Earth.
I arrived in NYC on a red eye and there Don picked me up in our rental car and we were off for an adventure to Salem, Massachusetts,which was 4 1/2 hours away. The day was totally lucid for both us. The plan was to meet Cynthia a great friend from JFK in Salem Massachusetts to reconnect and to do some art. We arrived sychronistically at the Salem Inn when Cynthia did. I checked out our room 12 and it felt dark and creepy. Later we had found out it was surrounded by haunted rooms above and on both sides. It was strange Don and I instinctively went to the Peabody house instead, which was a yellow colonial from the 17th century. After our experience in room 12 we asked for a room in the Peabody house.There the energy was light and spacious. Don was totally intrigued and was a ghost hunter for those two days, asking everyone if they had an experience with the spirits at the historic Inn. It is a beautiful inn with impeccable service and it is really haunted by unsettled spirits.
Salem is dotted with all these silly tourist traps. Over priced and kitchy to hilt.The shops were filled with cheap trinkets and the center monument was the lady from the TV show Bewitched. I felt unsettled and disappointed at the consumerism in Salem. It seemed like any other tourist town with a catch of history that they exploited. Were had the real roots of this place gone? " How and why does materialism, consumerism make a tragic event feel like a Ripley's believe or not?" as my friend and co-founder of Art is Moving, Lauren shared a similar experience that she had in small town in Spain where there was a torture museum that displayed the methods and horrific tools used in Inquisition . In the tourist traps of Salem, I felt uneasy and I was really unsure of where and if I was going to do my Art.

The next day we went to the Willows park which is right on the bay and I saw my tree. It was far in the distance..and isolated from the carnival like crowd.
As I approached it is was a lone maple tree steps away from the edge of the coast. The gross and some what symbolic thing was it had a used sanitary napkin at its base. I say that because there was garbage all over this park. This was an experience I have seen at many sacred sites around the world. At the Hill of Tara in Ireland, the most sacred passage called weirdly the mound of passages, was littered with garbage. Symbolic? I removed that and Cynthia who was videoing me said it was anointed by menstrual blood. Earlier Cynthia had created her own eco-art, a spiral with rocks on the beach. While she was creating I was moved to collect mussel shells to incorporate into my composition. The tree shrine that I was creating was a crescent,lunar one and the mussels also symbolized the feminine connection to the ocean, which is said to be the womb of the world.



As I connected with the tree I remembered an amazing dream that I had were I was led to the world tree and there I had created a shrine. Afterwards, I laid underneath the tree, starring into the heavens- through the branches of the eternal in Ahh..

I hope my shrines will help build awareness of our spiritual connection with the environment, and that they will help foster reverence for all life. if you actually stubbled upon one of my shrines shoot me a line or if you have comments I would love to hear your response.
Namaste, Lisa