The circle is an infinite circumference with no beginning or end. It is the universal sign of perpetual motion. It is an opening, a hole, a sphere. It can be an egg, a seed, an eye. SUN-A-NUS. The black all-absorbing hole.
Making circles to tune in the silent center of my mind, a small invisible point from which existence radiates. The absolute presence of being, by some given the name GOD, the principal object of faith.
Openings allow for passage between the worlds
Conversations with Ogotemmeli (p. 95), Marcel Griaule
The residues of repeated repair and caregiving strengthen the body
Body as house or community (huskropp–samhällskropp) Temple or sacred body
Star of the 10th moon (2015) was built site-specifically with clay bricks. The clay was kept wet for the duration of the exhibition, with a person winding long strands of wet linen, to wrap and unwrap the earthen vessel every three days. In the end it was demolished back into a pile of wet clay. The vessel carries the energy worked into it through the intention of the performer or directly through the performer’s body (as in art or rituals). An object can be seen as the embodiment or residue of action. This is the inherent power of the object.
The burnt clay objects in the work Undistorted Image of…(2015) are forms derived from collected images of people’s birthmarks. The birthmarks, Descartes wrote, were undistorted images of things perceived by the pregnant mother and exposed as prints on the skin of her foetus. They are flat and therefore the given form is one of an infinite number of interpretations.
These forms are also hollow with small holes for the passage of energy, as the hole in an eye that allows light to enter the body. The image must be interpreted, thereby distorted, to be seen.
the initial landing of the Nommo spaceship: “The ark landed at night on the dry soil of the Fox, stirring up a pile of dust raised by the whirling wind it caused... since it was made of the Nommo’s placenta, that is, of moist, soft earth, it slipped on the ground. The ark (when it) arrived on Earth, slipped in the mud. As it landed, the weight of the ark caused the ‘blood’ that saturated the placenta to spurt up into the sky. This ‘blood’ joined itself with the star called ie pelu tolo, ‘star of the tenth moon,’ witness to the resurrection of the Nommo, giving it being and brilliance.”
Le renard pâle, Paris, Institut d’ethnologie, 1965
Germaine Dieterlen
&
Marcel Griaule
Power objects “take the form of an anthropomorphic or zoomorphic figure, an animal horn, a clay pot, a basket and many others [...] The container itself is a mere object until it is animated by medicines.”
Art and Spirituality, Wyatt MacGaffey / African Spirituality, ed. Jacob Olupona.
clay has memory
1. SAMLAREN Hämtar från jordhögarna
2. BLANDAREN Blandar och tömmer
3. MATAREN
Drar ut och matar ormen
4.ORMEN
Lägger ut ormen i cirklar (medsols/motsols)
5. STAMPAREN Följer ormen och stampar rytmen som pressar ihop
6. KOMPASSEN
Markerar cirkeln och kallar till stillhet
7. TRÅDAREN
Drar och fäster taggtråden
Circumambulations for Kivik (MA),
