PROJECT: 100 PRAYERS FOR THOSE WHO WATCH OVER US
PROJECT: 100 prayers for those who watch over us
100 Prayers for Those Who Watch Over Us began in the fall of 2020 during the pandemic lockdown, a work consisting of 100 6" x 6" images (60 paintings/40 photos) each accompanied by a handwritten text on parchment tied with a ribbon and attached to the photo frame or with sealing wax to the back of each painting. The image informs the text, the text informs the image through an intuitive process creating metaphorical relationships, each work embodying its own inner logic, inviting open associative interpretations toward meaning.
Each piece is a visual prayer, a poem, a homage to the sacred, dear and ordinary informed by my everyday encounters with the tangible and intangible, actual and virtual, memory and subconscious dream image, capturing degrees of experience and feeling, living in these turbulent, unpredictable times.
PART I: 50 images were completed during the pandemic lockdown. PART II: 50 images to be created post-pandemic beginning April 2024
I completed 50 of these works during the pandemic lockdown. The final 50 6" x 6" images, each with their own text (30 photos, 20 paintings) are to be created in this post pandemic period, to be completed by the winter of 2024.
The creation of the first 50 works of this project served as a necessary vehicle for personal grounding, sustaining some form of beauty and hope while living amidst a daily collective energy of fear within a period of great destruction and restriction of life globally, unprecedented in our lifetime, including my own near-death experience with Covid.
Though we are still living in a period of societal upheaval, shifting relationships and uncertainty, I believe we have entered the beginning of a new era of immense possibilities to restructure and recreate our lives and social systems in a manner that honors and supports all life in its wondrous diversity, to flourish rather than merely survive. It is utilizing the spirit of and within this more holistic new energy of change amidst the necessary slow collapse of old beliefs, systems and ways of being that no longer serve the good of humanity, that I aim to create the final 50 works for 100 Prayers for Those Who Watch Over Us, starting April 2024 - with an intended public exhibition, and hopefully catalogue, once completed.
The texts (my own compositions) and images will continue to be created through a sensory and visual exploration incorporating metaphorical and associative representations of moments, memories, visions, people, places, animals, objects, forms of nature in relationship with each other inspired by and rendered to evoke different emotional states and experiences at the intersection of daily life felt and observed - as life and dream, desire and despair, safety and danger, beauty and brutality, love and rage, rest and resistance.
The nature of this work serves not only as a visual poetic diary/document/barometer of our time, but as an act of communion with others, in a spirit of sincerity, vulnerability, inspiration and sharing, asking ourselves: What do we value? What gives us joy? What do we hold dear? Where do we find Solace, Hope and Love?
