Tag: creative

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Judy Chicago – Just Create

The Dinner Party (detail). Ishtar place setting

THIS

What a great article about the creative process. And what a #BadassWoman!

When Judy Chicago’s piece, The Dinner Party, was first shown 40 years ago. It was maligned by most art critics. Revolutionary art usually is. But Judy simply kept following her vision, kept creating. And the rest of the world eventually caught up to her.

Now in her 70’s, Judy Chicago is still a take no prisoners kind of artist. I’m in awe.

I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling, that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized world. I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.

~Judy Chicago, 1979

Read The NY Times article here.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/t-magazine/judy-chicago-dinner-party.html

“… She wants everyone to see her art and to understand it, so that it might change them and the world.

And it has. Once your eye is trained to see Chicago’s imprint, it is everywhere, and unmistakable. It’s in Petra Collins’s menstruation-positive T-shirts; in the forthcoming installation on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. by Zoe Buckman of a huge uterus drawn in neon tubing crowned with boxing gloves; in the pink “pussy hats” that are worn in opposition to Trump’s election. Images like these — symbolically overt, politically and anatomically in-your-face, forcing a public confrontation with sexism — are all descended from Chicago’s imagination…” ~Sasha Weiss, NY Times

🌙

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Goddess of the Silver Wheel

Corona Borealis

Celtic Goddess Arianrhod (ah-ree-AHN-rhohd) has a long and celebrated history. Through the years, she has gone by many names: Goddess of the Silver Wheel, Goddess of Reincarnation, Welsh Star, Mother-Moon Goddess, and the Silver Wheel that Descends into the Sea. Her name actually translates as ‘silver’ (Arian) ‘wheel’ (Rhod) in Welsh.

With skin as pale as the moon, Arianrhod is a beautiful and powerful Dark Goddess. She is the daughter of the Great Mother Goddess Don and her consort Beli.  And like her mother before her, Arianrhod is a symbol of feminine power and sovereignty. She rules fertility, birth and rebirth. She is also a weaver of cosmic time and fate, the one who decides when a Soul is ready to be reborn.

Arianrhod lives in the far north, on the magical island of Caer Sidi (Revolving Castle) with her female attendants. The ancients believed that her castle, Caer Arianrhod, was located in the Corona Borealis, a group of circumpolar stars that appear to rotate around the North Star. Corona Borealis means Northern Crown, which is very fitting for a powerful sovereign Goddess.  Legend tells us that poets and astrologers learned the wisdom of the stars at Caer Sidi.

The moon is an archetypal symbol of the ancient Mother Goddess that is connected to the female womb, death, rebirth and the sacred feminine power of creation. The Celtic people counted time not by days, but by nights, and made their calendars focused on the moon instead of the sun. Ancient Celtic astrologers took their observations from the position of the moon and its progress in relation to the northern stars. They were guided by Arianrhod’s silver wheel of stars.

Arianrhod’s starry home is also known as Annwn, the Otherworld or Land of the Dead.  When people die, it is said that Arianrhod’s attendants bring them to Caer Sidi. There, in the stillness of the hub of Arianrhod’s silver wheel, the Souls of the dead are nurtured by Arianrhod’s attendants while waiting for their fate to be decided.  Arianrhod is able to shape shift into a large owl. Like the moon,  the owl is an ancient symbol of death, rebirth, magic, spiritual wisdom and initiation. With her great owl eyes, Arianrhod can see into the depths of each human soul. She is said to move through the dark of night with power and purpose, her wings spreading to give comfort and healing to all who seek her.

As is the case with most of the powerful Goddesses, stories tell us that Arianrhod was eventually humiliated, tricked and stripped of her children and her sovereignty by a Christian warlord. For Arianrhod, death was said to come when the sea reclaimed the land where the Christian lord had forced her to live in exile.

And yet… when I look up and see her silver wheel of circumpolar stars that continues to revolve in our night sky year after year, I can still feel her power and grace. Arianrhod is there amongst the stars, patiently waiting for us to rediscover her.

☾☽

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In Honor of Mothers Everywhere

Spring Blossoms

Mothers, I am here to remind you of your crown.
You have literally been initiated
into the creative source of the Universe.
 
So often, I have seen mothers uproot themselves
from their own superpower when trying to act in the world,
as if the big boys in suits know the rules of
the game of creation better than they do.
 
Mothers, you know how creation works, more than anyone.
Stay close to that knowing.
The knowing is not in your cranial brain;
it is in your womb brain.
You do the impossible; you have superpowers.
You have been through receiving life, growing life,
gestation, holding, sustaining. You know how to wait;
you’ve been through all the different changes
that happen in order for new life to come.
You know and have experienced exactly
when the time is right to move in full action.
And you have learned this symbiosis,
this total merging with another being—
the complete, utter commitment
and surrender required of you.
 
We need you more than ever. Your Shakti, in my view,
is what’s going to save us.
And it is saving us every single day.
Without you, none of this would be here.
 
Mothers, take your seat.
Straighten that crown, and hold your head high.
Own what you’ve been through and what you’re going through.
The world needs you.

~ Chameli Ardagh

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Old Woman Weaves and Watches

				Old woman is watching
				Watching over you
				  in the darkness of the storm
				  she is watching
			          watching over you

				weave and mend
				weave and mend
			    Old Woman is watching
				watching over you
			    with her bones become a loom
				she is weaving
				watching over us
				weave and mend
				golden circle
				weave and mend
				sacred sisters
				weave and mend
				
				I have been searching
				lost
				alone
				I have been searching
				for many years

				I have ben searching
				Old Woman

				and I find her 
				in
				myself

excerpt from “The Face of Old Women”  by Anne Cameron

Spider Web
Spider Weaves and Waits by Nancy L