creativity is the singing bird in my garden
Keith Turner has made a lovely film of the installation, with his video and recording of me performing the poem at Nottingham Peace Fair 2014. l wish l’d fitted in some more rehearsing, you can hear me relax about 10 lines in – that’s a Suffolk accent that starts to come out 😉
Thanks again for all your support, Keith!
I have been working intensively on my fibre art installation for Peace Week in Nottingham…due to illness and a hold up with the wooden plaques, I’ve been having to work faster than I like/is good for me. [wow, I’m getting the hang of pacing, I actually expressed that right first time round, previously I would enjoy working this fast, however tiring, that’s progress!]
One side effect this has had is on being able to name it, the name finally became clear on Tuesday, and it has been installed today – Saturday…oh my!Still, better late than never. It has been ‘the peace thing’, Peace Has Wings, and now Peace, the Hundredth Heart.
I have copied ‘peace’ in 99 languages, including many different scripts/alphabets… it condenses down to 87 plaques due to some languages sharing the same word. I thought, shall I look up a one hundredth? and then it came to me, what we need is not all these words, spoken or thought or prayed, valuable as all those are, but a feeling in the heart that can be shared across nations and cultures and scripts and alphabets…we need to ALL have the hundredth heart, where peace is felt and breathed and lived and held dear, not a cerebral thing, to be discussed and negotiated, good as those things are, but felt, beyond words…and art is non verbal communication, intuitive philosophy, so how better to say this?
The Hundredth Heart
I have written peace 99 times
to 99 people all around the world – or who live next door 😉
sometimes in scripts I had to draw,
tongue sticking out with concentration,
ink dancing in flamboyant swirls,
and I ask you to meet me here,
you, the 100th heart
who needs no word, who knows how to
live, love, dance, cook, teach, nurse, grow peace
reach peace, share peace, laugh and sing and draw and paint and sculpt
peace
from the very sticky clay
that is our messy world
I ask you to meet me here,
you, the 100th heart
who needs no words, who knows
how to lay down difference and to work together
to not need to be right and to not need every last thing spelt out
but to start in
here and now
in the moment of power
in the moment of change
where we are all human
and can use the silver bridge of understanding
that being human on a blue and green planet gives us,
now we see how grey and brown and dry and dead
we are making it…
I ask you to meet me here,
you, the 100th heart
who needs no words, who is
finding a place in the middle
where we can agree not to poison the river,
not to strip the hills till they fall into the sea,
not to spray the fields till they are silent and poisoned,
not to mine and frack the earth up, till it swallows itself
and takes us with it
You, the hundredth heart that knows we can all stand on that silver bridge,
that without us, the words will be there, but empty
peace needs the hundredth hearts
to live, love, dance, cook, teach, nurse, grow peace
reach peace, share peace, laugh and sing and draw and paint and sculpt
peace
from the very sticky clay
that is our messy world
to grow peace in the sticky clay of our hearts, where we
get hooked in to petty troubles and wanting the things pushed on us by
a greed making world of money and politics
that has forgotten the
blue and green planet
the stars in the night sky
the silver bridge
we need the hundredth hearts who reach out
and with their smile
make us know
how simple peace can be
where it starts
without words
the hundredth hearts
And so the last string of plaques have little heart shaped mirrors…
The installation went really well, I had support from Sam and tree climbing from Tom, who knows Jen and Bob, my usual tree monkeys… Three hours of quiet and therapeutic play really!
I will try and get better pictures tomorrow, my hands were a bit shaky by the end…and I need to look up fig trees in myth, Sea Change is hung on the biggest fig tree I’ve ever seen!
I have been trapped in a super low energy, super painful fibromyalgia flare, hanging on to my moods by my fingertips some days, and with white knuckles on others…Luckily, as the trigger episode fades, my energy is gradually trickling back, and I am beginning to be able to make again, and the piece I was calling Muse/d is now nearly finished. I’ve changed the name to Organic Process, because really, process is my muse…
Layering and clawing back for a raking light; layering and moulding shape and shadow by weighting with embellishments… I make painting and fibre art the same way, with attention to tiny details almost lost in a sea of colours and textures, with similar issues for resolution, finding the moment when the whole is in balance as the sum of its parts… I’m not there yet with this piece, but nearly, nearly…One problem is that the piece is nearly 2 metres tall so simply taking it all in at one glance is almost impossible – which is part of my message to the world! Everything deserves a second glance, a few moments of attention, an exploration before judgments are made…
These photos were taken by Keith Turner, and edited by me
These are all mine, and need to be taken again using a tripod really, but they give some idea 😉
September 30, 2014
singingbirdartist
birds sing artblog 