IMAGES THAT EMERGE from the SOUL: WINTON, QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA

HALLELUJAH PILGRIMS! Hallelujah to this PRECIOUS EARTH and to our JOURNEYS whilst we are here! How are you feeding YOUR CREATIVITY? I am CURIOUS because my deepest LOVE (other than my Chiboogamoo) is the IMAGE that EMERGES from the SOULS of each and every PILGRIM. I keep an urgent question close to my HEART—how would everyone’s PHYSICAL experience in a SPECIFIC PLACE manifest itself in a PARTICULAR VISUAL PICTURE? What if each PILGRIM made ART, and we all could SEE his or her SPIRIT embodied?

 

On my PILGRIMAGE with my Chiboogamoo, I have had the good fortune of seeing ART which EMBODIES the SPIRITS of PILGRIMS inhabiting Winton and its neighboring towns in central Queensland, Australia, about a 500-kilometer drive from the charming coastal city of Townsville.  Please take a moment to breathe in these beautiful concrete expressions of SOULs living in the outback of northeast Australia with its vast treeless grasslands in which an occasional acacia or eucalyptus stand jut out from its open vistas. The red earth also gathers itself at moments and erupts into towering hills and plateaus. Kangaroos bounce across this vastness, weaving in and out of herds of sheep and cattle. The gulahs and brolgas fill the sky with flapping wings and chatter!

Cities, like Winton also suddenly arise out of these seemingly infinite grasslands. And how WONDERFUL are the SURPRISES that the city of Winton holds for the TRAVELER! Although this city is small—its modest number of blocks can be traveled by foot from edge to edge in about 30 minutes--its inhabitants’ LOVE for what is ARTFUL is large and clearly established!

On Elderslie Street, across from where my Chiboogamoo and I stayed in the North Gregory Hotel, is the Waltzing Matilda Centre. In addition to providing documentation to the history of this iconic song, it also houses the “Outback Regional Gallery,” which promotes local artists. It is at this gallery that I got to imbibe some LOCAL visual SOUL. Look at these images! At these “SOULs”! (All the artwork you see here belongs to local Queensland artists.)

Walking northeast several blocks from the Waltzing Matilda Centre, we were DELIGHTED to visit “Arno’s Wall.”  Hallelujah! Grotjahn Arno’s  SPIRIT has been creating this wall for over 30 years, patiently collecting tools, hubcaps, statues, and whatever he thought would add pizzazz to this 2-meter-high and 70-meter-long wall made from rock quarried from his opal mine in the nearby town of Opalton. Thank you Arno!

Leaving Arno’s Wall behind, and walking past the caravan park, Matilda Country Tourist Park, and refueling road trains filled with mooing cattle, my Chiboogamoo and I successfully found the “Musical Fence”—a Winton touristic destination that had filled us with immeasurable curiosity! Imagine PILGRIMS my anticipation! The winter sun is setting in central Queensland. We have left the architectural structures  of the city behind, and we “discover” a sign introducing us to this musical wonder constructed by Graeme Leak in 2003. How was this SPIRIT, this PERCUSSIONIST able to “tune” a fence?  With PLEASURE, my husband and I picked up wooden sticks and PLAYED as the sky darkened and red streaks burst out on the grasslands. The wind blew and the fence reverberated! HALLELUJAH! (Listen to me "play" the fence!)

We thought Leak’s musical fence was the zenith of our Winton cultural experience. But! We hadn’t seen BUSH POETs perform at the caravan park! Spoken Word ARTISTS, Slam competitors, speakers of the people--whatever you want to call these story tellers of the outback, their performances are mesmerizing!  When we stopped at the caravan park on our way back to the hotel, it was dark, but the heart of the caravan park was glowing. Not a seat was left at these buskers’ “free” performance. People were hanging onto fences and sitting on garbage cans, leaning in to hear two forty-ish women wearing cowboy hats. The only money these POETs get is whatever is collected in their hats at night’s end. That and selling their CDs. How I wish we had purchased one! For now, these poets’ names remain unknown to me and my Chibogamoo! My apologies FELLOW CREATIVE SPIRITs!

Dinner at the Gregory brought us into close contact with the hotel’s current proprietor, a Philippine woman long married to an Australian. Running an old hotel in the outback is no easy thing, but this proprietor was a real CREATIVE. Luckily for Chiboogamoo and me, she sat us down in front of an old player piano, which in order to make run, we had to pedal like a bike! Next to the piano is a cabinet with more than twenty original paper rolls with songs from the early 20^th century!  Listen to my Chiboogamoo play!

PILGRIMS I will be writing more about Winton in a future blog, so I will conclude here with two questions: 1) WHAT CREATIVE ACT WILL YOU TAKE TODAY TO EXPRESS YOUR SOUL’S VIEW OF REALITY?  2) HOW WILL YOU INTERACT WITH FELLOW PILGRIMS SO THAT YOU CAN SEE THEIR SOULS?

Hallelujah SOUL BLOGS with you to SEE you! Please write me and SHARE your precious self with me! Hallelujah!

The SOUL is not in the BODY; The BODY is in the SOUL--Cleaning Out Sally’s Studio Closet

 

When a FRIEND dies right in the middle of things, right in the middle of LIFE—where does it leave those of us who remain? When Sally died on August 22, 2010, it left vast and various communities here in the Atlanta area openly wondering this question. What do we MAKE of our LOVE for Sally and what do make of our LIVES?  Last February at a SPIRITUAL ART PILGRIMS’ meeting Sally quoted to us from Hildegard von Bingen: “The soul is not in the body; the body is in the soul.”

(All of the artwork you see here in this particular blog is Sally's. I am especially fond of the image of the woman's head with the leaf coming out of her mouth. Speaking of nature? Aspiration? The black torso with the head coming out of its side is an image of Sally's that she repeated frequently. For her, it was about the emergence of Eve from Adam's ribs. The little boy figure cut out of pond rubber is one of many pieces Sally left behind. Each fragment tells part of her story.)

Does that mean that once the BODY is gone, that the SOUL is still here, present among us? Certainly for those of us who are artists, we can find evidence of Sally in the art that she left us. Could we change Von Bingen’s words like this: “The soul is not in the art. The art is in the soul.”?

 

 

On Labor Day, Britt, Sally’s husband, invites me into the splendor of the holy objects belonging to his wife, my friend, my collaborator in the refugee community art workshops, and fellow art maker and PILGRIM. Britt asks me into her studio to put away her art supplies. Thank you Britt for giving me this opportunity to be with Sally, as everything about her feels so fleeting, as if she is leaving all of us, escaping into an eco-zone beyond this EARTH. In her studio, I hold her Art—the art-if-facts of Sally Wylde.

(In order to gather Sally's art supplies, I had to gather her "artifacts" that inhabited the shelves amongst all of her paints, tools and papers. I stacked larger pieces of artwork. I put smaller ones in plastic baggies to await her daughters' arrivals and perusal. Some I took out and pinned on the bulletin board you see here to join other work Sally had hanging there. )

Artifacts—half human figures with holes in their torsos, galloping horses, women dancing, half forms of trees and houses, paper after paper hand-sized like a bird nestled in shelves with pieces of brightly colored fabric, remnants of performances—the Lump Journey’s eggs (rattle shakers), tree limbs, branches, pieces of bamboo, honeycomb, grape vines twirled into haloes, words, calendars, numbers, lots and lots of pencils, staplers, pliers, gallons of glue, rubber, boards, larger pieces of paper, important Mark Nepo poems, layers and layers of LIFE, blue, green, red—multicolor expressions, memories incremented on line of fabric, sewn into garments, glued onto paper, holding whispers of yearning….Sally yearned for ever more knowledge, leaning into the feminine, cultivating and anticipating increasing wisdom. Sally was beyond being a nature lover—she was a NATURE BELIEVER and worshiper….

 How many paintbrushes are there? More than it is timely to count. How many paint tubes? Old ones dying or dead, newer ones bigger and fresh. Scissors and jars of paint, carving tools and printmaking inks, needles and pins, and embroidery floss, burlap and canvas, and mesmerizing fabric from exotic places. 

(Jesse, Cecelia, and Lesly met me at Sycamore Place Gallery, where Chiboogamoo and I have just gotten a studio space, to make prints for the parade following Sally's memorial service.  An important member was missing from our printmaking--Robey Tapp.)

The SOUL is not in the ART; the ART is in the SOUL. Sally, your SOUL left us these remnants. A group of us artists decide to open our SOULs and MAKE ART using the block prints you have left behind. It is there that we find you as we print these words on paper: WONDER, FEAR NOT, THANK YOU, ALL WILL BE WELL. We burnish your images in red, orange, green, and blue onto brown and white paper: a girl riding a galloping horse, a sailboat, women dancing, stars, and an angel…. 

(On September 11, minutes away from a sunset, we paraded down the streets of Oakhurst, passing Sally and Britt's house, to get to the community garden. On our way, we saw a rainbow in the sky!)

 

Other friends cut bamboo and cardboard, creating signs to hold these images of OUR UNIFIED SOULs. YOUR ART IS IN OUR SOULS. At your memorial service, the Oakhurst Baptist Church is filled with OUR COLLABORATIVE SOUL SIGNs.  Afterwards, in a joyous parade the community carries these banners to the community garden you started. Drums beat, and we dance holding you amongst us in YOUR images, OUR images now.

 Hallelujah for all of us SOULs—PILGRIMs. Hallelujah for ART being there inside us ALL. ALL WILL BE WELL. FEAR NOT. WONDER. THANKYOU. Hallelujah loves art and community! Hallelujah!