– Women of Creation –

It has been understood since back beyond the distant mists of time immemorial that there are four great elements of creation – Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. Since creatures first acquired the ability to perceive, it has been clear that all the forces that make our world are inextricably vested in the rolling grasslands and rising mountains, in the rushing airs of the high-blown night, in the burning, burning, burning of all things aflame, and in the swirling river eddies and great tides of river and ocean. Everything we know and understand is enmeshed in and governed by these realities, and all that they oversee is imbued with the generative power of change and transformation. And all of this is in the manner of Woman – she who manifests, she who brings forth, she who underlies, sings, ignites and bathes. We are birthed into her embrace, into their embrace. They cradle and inhabit all our hopes and dreams. They abide – these restless, eternal Women of Creation.

Earth Woman

She walks upon the Earth. She sits in regal consideration. She kneels upon the accepting ground in silent communion. She adorns in blossom and leaf, and breathes in the holy pheromones – the sacred scents and the mineral sharpness. She lays upon the Earth in her weariness and in her power, wrapping herself in its firmness and its fecundity. She gazes across it in sweet madness, drunk with its always-receding horizons and its risings and its fallings. She lays the garden across her bosom and places the living wreath upon her head. She roils the dust of it, slithers the lovely mud of this Earth, feels the ancient assurance of its great stone bones underfoot. She brings forth the things that grow and the things that then wither. She tastes the seasons in the spices of the greening and the browning. She is the ground of all things – the living foundation of all creatures. She is belly. She is Earth Woman.

Wind Woman

She rides the airs on gossamer and quill – she the Wind. She dresses herself in cloud and mist, in weightless garments of flight and freedom and lift. She sweeps down from great heights to bring messages from the wild blue, and yet swirls her skirts likewise so close as to seem akin to the ground-tethered things. She is zephyr and waft and breath and breeze – carrier of blossom scent and the sharp, anxious thrill of smoke. She is sky spirit. She is the gust and buffet and williwaw, the great howl of tornado and the terrible shriek of mother hurricane. She is the bringer of rain and the scourer of helpless snows who faint and fade before her mighty exhalations. She carries the seasons under her wing and brings all such promise of change. She is the clarity through which we see the stars of the heavens, and she is the rattling of our feeble windows in the high-blown hours of the night. She is Wind Woman.

Fire Woman

She licks with flaming tongue, craving the combustible. She sleeps in shimmering coals, ready to leap and dance into bright being. She swathes her glittering body in folds of glowing magma deep in the volcano’s heart, and reaches out million-mile arms of incandescence from the very surface of the Sun. She tosses her hair as scintillations amongst the campfire sparks – speaks in cracklings and snaps and hot exhalations from the sticks she so transforms. Oh, she burns for eternity in the distant, twinkling stars, and writes her arcing name across the night sky in the meteor’s flashing tail. She is the sizzling slash of the lightning bolt, bathing the world in an instant’s brilliance – and so the implacable devourer of great forests. And yet she is the gentle constancy of the candle’s flame which so comfortingly pushes back the darkness. She shines. She is living light. She is Fire Woman.

Water Woman

She is the great ocean whose ancient brine she carries in her womb. She is all streams which course and tumble and spill and meander. She is the tinkling brook and the surging cataract, the majestic flow and the trickling teardrop. She speaks in a sinuous language that tells of endless flowing on down to the sea – the sea which refuses no such rivers. She spills down to herald the coming birth of a child, and gives substance then to mother’s milk. She is mist and splash and dew, and in the snowflake, blossoms herself briefly into beguiling crystals. She too draws herself up in great sheets of ice to periodically trundle across the face of the world – and leaves, in her melting, myriad sparkling lakes. She is thirst-slaker. She is restlessness. She is cradle. She is the very font of life – the uterine element from which all creatures flow. She is the water that cleanses, that absolves, that sanctifies. She is the sweet rain upon your face. She is Water Woman.

Dusty and Scooter

The girl rides on towards the woman she will become.
And the Great Wheel rolls on and on……

Artist’s Statement

Consider the girl looking outward into a complex world into which she will soon emerge as a woman with all that such entitlement carries and bestows. She is small, she is thoughtful. She may be timid or she may be bold. As she puts aside the playthings of yesterday, she is immersed in her society’s interpretation of the value and expectations of her physical body – perhaps taunted for her thinness or her chubbiness, shamed for her pubescent changes, cowed by the vigour and dominance of the boys and men who swirl around her.

Or, more hopefully, maybe she is lucky enough to feel the sense of empowerment which grows out of her flowering realization of her anointed place in the nature of things. She begins to see clearly the generative ancestry of her sex, and comes to viscerally understand that it is the female element which carries with it the very spark of creation – the bringing forth of life, the nurturing of the child, the temperance against wanton violence, the cherishing of the beating heart.

In this show I hope to give this girl a vivid and profound affirmation of her deep and ancient power and her rightful claim to the essential elements of all that becomes us in this wondrous and bountiful world in which we live, love and toil. Earth, Wind, Fire and Water – we are born from out of them, and we return to them when our journey is done. In the woman is the girl. She blossoms and is beautiful.