Integration

I was lucky to have a few days exploring the forest on the slopes of Mt Taranaki. Sitting amongst mossy trunks and lichen covered branches of kamahi and fuchsia trees and further up the slope the remarkable totara and griselinia that grew along the tree line before it entered tracts of Olearia, (tree daisy) and small shrubs. Walking around Mt Taranaki is like climbing into and out of pleats of a skirt. I would hear falcon, stop and wait to catch a glimpse in vain and then finally seeing one, unexpected, as it silently glided through the grassy glade I was sitting in and on into the forest. I watched a small riorio feed a large long tailed cuckoo chick with a constant peeving call. I have a number of photos of mossy branches where the bird somehow is invisible and I had some conversations with a tomtit, quite a few in fact, although I think they might be one-sided. Sometimes it takes a while to land in a place, to integrate different sensory experiences and each place has its making and its stories and its ancestry.

Integration is a process that acknowledges a truth or insight or perhaps a separated aspect of ourselves and then co-ordinates that into a unified whole. I sometimes see the idea of wholeness as perhaps like a pūriri tree that may have been buffeted by winds or the many holes it has through pūriri grubs or kākā ripping at the bark. Puriri teaches me to accept the wounds, the hollow spaces, sometimes being present to these spaces, and continuing to grow. Integration is remembering to value the ordinary and mundane, understanding the sacred is embedded in physical form. I see the harm that can occur in the want for heightened spiritual experiences without any desire to do the practice to bring those experiences into meaning and form. I see people struggling to remember the importance of craft, of the slow practice involved to integrate our visions or our ecstatic mystical experiences. 

When I began contemplating integration, I started to explore why so many people resist this process. If the first part of integration is acknowledgement, then this involves a certain attendance. In a moment of conscious attendance, the separation is defined. We might feel the rough lines of delineation, here is perhaps pain, here is a separation, here is a wound, here is a heightened experience and following that there might be a fear of loss and a sense of no going back. We change when we integrate. And perhaps in that process a certain invisibility is inevitable, intensity might become mundane, the burning fire might transmute, that mantle of power may be laid down. We are humbled. We are part of earth. This is the foundation of my work.  

Driving back from Taranaki we picked up three 5-month-old Pekinese bantams. They are very beautiful with iridescent black feathers that reflect an emerald green sheen. I have enjoyed supporting them to integrate into a different environment. They are young and in this realization of responsibility I have found so many slow sweet moments. They didn’t know where to roost at night, in fact I was unsure if they had started roosting, they seemed a little unsettled. There is a little hutch in our run and our geriatric bantams tend to roost in the pear tree so I stood up on the bench we had and the young bantams followed leaping to nestle on my feet and then I stepped in the branch of the pear tree and they following nestling in. There was a lot of resettling and slowly I left them, it reminded me of those times of gently unraveling from a toddler as they just fall asleep. Right now, they are browsing on the plantain seeds outside my studio, little brrrrs of contentment, I think they help me put things in perspective, taking space, looking at my environment with different eyes.  

I had an exploration through the southern hemisphere medicine wheel feeling into the directions around practices of integration. I like to start in the east, and the practices of integration here is the realization of inhabiting life in our physical form, sensory awareness, nature connection, taste, smell, hearing, seeing and feeling. The joy of being alive, gratitude, speaking aloud a thanks-giving prayer. What stood out in the north was play, that beautiful balance between order and chaos, the delight in the unfolding nature of play. There was also the act of crafting, literally weaving your experience into form. As children we naturally integrated through play. spending time role playing by ourselves and with other children. Also the physicality of hide and seek and running in the fields and through the houses.  Before I moved in the west, I was aware of that afternoon energy of the north west, the place in our day of integration on a daily basis, remembering to pause, the do-nothing moment, the ritual of a cup of tea. I think too here could be the place of meandering, no destination, moving with a whim. In the west the integration was through community and belonging, friendships, the sharing of food, storytelling, laughter, music, dancing together. The south, integration came in the form of reflection, of writing, lying back looking up at the sky, the quiet go slow, a deep rest, the time of retreat.

In our great evolution that we seem to undergo in living our lives there is so much to integrate. We may need integration after healing if we experience an unraveling of the past, soul retrieval - integrating soul parts that have disassociated through trauma, and recovery from illness and shock. Integration of epiphanies, of experiences of merging, of falling in love, of powerful emotions and experiences of power. There is integration required when we experience intense memories from visiting a place, or traveling to new places and cultures. Some people merge in a way where they are unable to ground and connect to the ordinary world, sometimes they embody other beings, other dimensions and ghosts that they can’t find any understanding or be able to place in their world view. Often in this situation integration occurs through being listened to and finding places of belonging. What I haven’t even begun to look at here are those who witness or are victims of environmental devastation, calamity and war. How can such fierce wounds be attended to? Perhaps as a global community to be open to listen, to hear their stories. To no longer deny and turn our backs on what is painful.

Exploration -art, woodcut

the woodcuts slowly coming together

As I carve into the plywood, I consider the layers of story revealed through this wood cut. I cut away the lines where the kereru wings separate, I sense the feathers. I explore my feelings like a tongue on a jagged tooth. I sense a movement of trust, of faith in what I do. To give time to the crafting and to philosophy. As I cut the patterns of the wings I think about the rifts between art, imagination and science. I think about all the immeasurable phenomena, beauty and relationship with nature.

Following wing lines across a piece of ply.

Vertically I have drawn the cellular images of the Kawakawa. These images come from a book by Meylan Butterfield called The Structure of New Zealand woods. These microscopic images seem so removed from how I perceive the Kawakawa, and yet they are to be celebrated and within all these exquisite details, is still mystery, for the Kawakawa has its essence intact, that can’t be broken down to mechanistic processes. I embed these images into the piece and I can’t help but find myself thinking of lineage. The cultural values and ideas that I grew up with and further back too, about land and oak forests – the nature of dwelling in an interconnected way, until I am the moss, the lichen, the tree, the hill, the land, the wetland.

In my art I find my imagination is at play amongst forest and particularly plants. In more open landscapes I find I am exploring the details within landscape and the plants that grow there. It comes from a childhood of being a naturalist, observing minutely the landscape I grew up in, sand dune and forest. Of following in my father’s footsteps as plantsman, chemist, ecologist and environmentalist and being able to bridge this with my mother who was a landscape artist. I now see the importance of both close observation of nature and the individual perception and subjection vision of nature. I see through imagination how species entangle and connect to each other into a greater whole, and I, the viewer, am part of that complex relationship. I love how I can enter into a timelessness through being in nature, particularly as a child, and how love enhanced my seeing. Somehow through my visioning there was a divine unity at work and wonderment amongst diversity.

I am not sure in this woodcut whether the unity is Kawakawa or kereru. Both weave their light.

Kawakawa, macropiper excelsum, is a shrub that can grow to a small tree up to six metres tall. the stems and branches have swollen joints and the bark is smooth, a brownish black. Sometimes older trunks are black. The leaves are heart-shaped, alternate, smooth margined, and shiny. My relationship with Kawakawa has grown slowly over months. There is a large Kawakawa near our house. I observe it on a daily basis, looking out to it from the window of my kitchen, washing dishes and watching the kereru bend its branches with its weight, its red eye seeing me, whilst nonchalantly turning its head to feed on the fruit. Sometimes the branch bends so much the kereru loses its balance and falls of, fluttering and re-establishing itself slightly ruffled. The kereru love feeding on the fruit which are orange fusing with the inflorescent spikes. The flowers of kawakawa are like slender erect candles and are often paired with male and female spikes on different plants. Flowers are tiny; the male flowers have a few stamens and the females a single green ovary each.

The path that leads down to the studio passes by the Kawakawa and I often pause and look through its tattered leaves into the light. The leaves are riddled with holes, at times the leaves are fragmented as if large bites have been taken out of them. This is the result of caterpillars of a native moth, Cleora scriptaria.

concept drawing for woodcut

From idea, through observation and sketching to further concepts, to design, drawing and then to the cutting away, mark making with a Japanese woodcutting tool, following lines of patterns in the wood. I wonder at this process that awakens so many ideas and thoughts. I made a remedy of Kawakawa flowers, both the male and the female, allowing its essence to merge into the water, and then preserving the water. I wrote how the essence gave me an insight to the layering of lineage. Everything has lineage and in the interconnectedness of all things we are able to experience lineage as a layered foundation upon which we stand. Kawakawa allows for the quality of being connected through being alone. It was interesting that, I think of that way of being as an artist. That to do my artmaking I like to be alone and it is through that aloneness that I find so much connection.

This artwork is comprised of twelve panels, 29.5 cm x 42 cm, each piece connecting to an overall 118 cm x 126 cm woodcut. I have not yet started the printing process, I want to finish all the panels before I begin. I am going to do a reduction woodcut process where I print a colour and then cut away for the next colour. Most panels will be two colours with a third colour coming through the head and the upper wings of the kereru. It is the first time I have worked on such a large piece. I am enjoying the process of revealing and at the same working into a structure. I see the structure as holding the depth. I do that with writing too, writing into the structure and seeing how that supports lines of verse that can transport. The woodcut does not lend itself to fine lines, rather a cutting open, a revealing through pattern.

Exploration - Gardens

My studio sits in the garden, I will sometimes get up from whatever I am engaged in; writing, drawing, carving a woodcut and wander out, attending randomly to a plant or simply looking. I spend a lot of time gazing in the garden, there is so much to take in. In the spring, particularly I go from the detail, the tender corolla of the wild carrot, to the overall sensation of buds and leaf, the scent, the colour, the exuberant growth. Everyday new discoveries; the echinacea unfolding its red hued leaves from the ground, plaintain stretching its stems long, a cylindrical spike of flowers, a breeze gently rocking them side to side. The new leaves of comfrey stretch up like fingers from the earth and have white hairs that are soft like fine fur. Textured and strong it smells of earth and wet rock. Yesterday, whilst preparing a bed, I dug up a comfrey root as carefully as I could, keeping the long roots intact. I balanced it on a cup and settled down to draw it. There is something about taking the time to draw that I feel like I can take up space. I enjoy the attendance to the curl of a tendril, to its character and to the overall rhythm. Time opens up and slips past. I get the feel of its medicine, its cohesive power, joining back together what has come apart.

Meandering

I am lying in the tent – hiding from the midges that are hanging in dark clouds – on the Isle of Arran. I am listening to the water and a bird giving a soft whistle call as if it's having a conversation about the ordinary events of the day. I am alone. I feel like having a conversation with the bird, I could talk about how I didn’t see any large ticks in the bracken and the colour of the green and the bog and the mist and the dark cloud. How large that dragonfly was, and hugging the granite for dear life and the butterflies lifting off around me as I walked – the sound of the bird is merging with the water, as my thoughts tumble out like the stream, reflecting on Germany, my family, the deep explorations I did with Andrea, Ramona and Steffi, the forest and the land. I reflect back to arriving at Steffi’s place near Übersee.  

I am waiting for Steffi in her farmhouse attic apartment, she is at a meeting and her neighbour brought me here from the train station. I am sitting in a rocking chair covered in a sheepskin, looking out to the mountains of Austria and southern Bavaria. There is a pile of German children’s books about dwarfs, giants and forest animals, and I am surrounded by herbs and books and vinegars. I am in happiness; I feel like Piglet surrounded by haycorns. I gaze upon the changing landscape as cloud and shadow and light dramatically shift across the mountains, at the same time dropping into the eclectic choice of Steffi’s books.
    
From a late night of talking and laughing to morning, and whilst it is still morning we wander down to the swamplands, talking, meandering, grazing and pausing to observe. We also gather meadowsweet for a tincture, picking the newer flowers randomly. Meandering is as a river flows, the sinuous movement that the river takes through landscape, creating landscape as it moves as landscape also creates it. Meander was a river. A river from the uplands of western Turkey to the Aegean Sea. And it definitely meandered (although not so much now) creating fertile areas, renewing itself as it coursed its way down to the Aegean Sea.  It is now called Büyuk Menderes.
    
In Germany I have never seen a meandering river – over centuries they have seen the meandering, sinuous quality of rivers as inefficient and have straightened and controlled the many rivers that cross the European landscape. Even the clear mountain river near Steffi’s is bound by stopbanks.

When we meander, it is like a process of beginnings, the landscape seems to begin again as we are led from one curiosity to another, timeless, renewing, we are in the state of being lost and not lost at the same time, for we are not going anywhere. Meandering has become a symbol for non-deterministic systems, this means you take more time to explore possibilities, there are mistakes and backtracking, there are unexpected challenges, there is interaction, there seems to be always a state of humour, and yes complexity and irregularity. To meander we have to go off the tracks and roads, these are often straight and designed for an outcome. Off track, views are happened on, and as we walk, aspects are connected, for we are the ones doing the connecting. We may reconnect to a path and then move off again. There are no compartments in meandering, there is no putting an aspect apart from another.
    
I often think about how we as a culture have made spirituality separate from ourselves, as if we have to do something to be spiritual rather than just be ourselves. I see the nature of meandering as participating in the natural fluidity of being ourselves and that through that openness of curiosity and allowing a movement to arise we open up our senses to things in a surprising way. I guess it’s a kind of listening and it's unique to be able to do that with another.
    
In the afternoon Steffi and I travelled up to the Alm hut. The Alm is a place in the mountains where the people would take their animals up to the alpine fields to reside in the summer months and the alm hut was where they housed them. There are a few small rooms for the people. The hillsides were steep and the alm hut sat at the edge of a narrow mountain valley.  The hut was cool and dark, its function and simplicity intermingled to create a kind of beauty that naturally anchored into the landscape. As we walked up the steep rutted road, we were still touched by the space of meandering, and this allowed us to pause and explore the stream. I was reminded of the missions my father would do where suddenly in the midst of a journey in the car he would take an unknown side road. These excursions could be hairy but they often ended in remarkable places that became mysterious for me as I could never find them again.
    
In a culture that does not normally value meandering, I started to wonder about the relationship between structure and meandering. It’s like the river and landscape. Both create one another, and they can work together. I suddenly felt that the value of meandering could also be accessed at any moment, the feeling of being open to the unknown, and the choice to move with that. As Steffi and I lay in our sleeping bags looking up at the ash tree, an owl landed in it and we felt a quiet that pushed out a space in the world. Then the owl departed as silently as it had arrived.