Listening to the Mother
9th Installation of 12
February 21, 2023- March 20, 2023
Cycles of Joy
Nature moves in continual cycles of life and death, growth and decay, winter into spring. With each transformation journey there are joys and difficulties. Spring celebrates the joys more than any of the infinite cycles of our world.
Cycles of Joy
The 9th installation of the ‘Listening to the Mother’ project.
I dreamed of moss after coming home from the forest. This wasn’t unusual. I’ve long been seduced and charmed by the softly brilliant green unrooted plants.
My time in the PNW temperate rainforest has only heightened this life long infatuation.
I had been working on the last bits of the previous installation (Stream of Life), and decided to add a few pieces of moss to it. The green mini worlds seemed to bring the whole piece to life.
I knew I wanted to work with this amazingly complex and resilient material for the 9th installation but had no idea how or where it would fit.
Then I dreamed that night of all the moss covered shapes I’ve encountered in the forest as I wander around. There’s the shaggy baby elephant and the very pregnant tree, and there’s a great mother tree stump with green tendrils of moss climbing around her that seemed to be intentional decoration as beautiful as any designer in Paris could conjure.
As I woke, I remembered some fuzzy details and began to write about them. As I did this it triggered another memory of a Japanese art called kokadame.
(“koke” meaning moss and “dama” meaning ball) Kokedama is the practice of taking the root ball of a plant and suspending it in a mud ball, which is then coated with soft green moss.
I wasn’t sure about all the details of the installation at that point but I did know it would be woven into natures seasonal cycle of spring and growth and contain some way of expressing the joy of the infinite potential in beginnings.
I gathered humus from the forest floor, found some clay to make a slurry and gently harvested a few pieces of the ubiquitous moss from the fallen logs near where I planned to work in the forest.
I brought the forest home to experiment.
I was transported to childhood mud cake sessions and making fairy tea party tables covered in leaves and moss.
The experiments also produced beautiful living orbs of moss. Full of that joy of spring and the promise of beginnings.
Just what I needed!
