Artist's Statement



I'm not really sure just how I do what I do as I create. As I write or sculpt or paint, play an instrument or sing, I disappear, becoming whatever it is that is being creatively born. It is only in a sort of shimmering aftermath that I realize I have been absent, and like a whale emerging from the depths suddenly 'I am' once more.
I am sitting in a room. There is a window beside me, softened at its edges by curtains, and a breeze pulls through. There is a floor beneath my feet. Where have I been?

Then I look and see that the paper beneath my hands is no longer blank, or the room resonates with the music that has flown forth from the guitar I am holding. Words have crowded onto the page of my notebook like a gathering of gleeful old friends. Something I cannot fully explain, whose origins are a complete mystery, exists, where before it did not.


While I do not know how I do what I do, I deeply know why. Much of the world is in pain, and those of us in it feel, in various ways, the dissonance, as the pain reverberates through. Something is wrong with the way we regard the Earth. Something is broken as we treat each other so poorly, as we stagnate in hate, and as we are absorbed by fear. Something needs to change, as we are so bad to ourselves, as we succumb to doubt, isolation and anger.

As I disappear, I think I must be seeking a solution to some of these challenges, issues, and difficulties. What I bring back with me, in words or images or music, responds to the friction, loneliness, misunderstanding and hurt in the world. It questions the way things are, and suggests kindness, symbiosis, awareness and playfulness. It acknowledges what we may lose if we cannot change from our present course, but never fully deviates from the joy and brightness that is still possible.


- Jorie Jenkins



Thursday, June 23, 2016

Ou-Ti of Yaawo-Ana, City of Trees


The Ou-Ti Musicians : Inu'a and Dhalin



Inu'a and Dhalin have been raised in a tropic bird culture relatively sequestered in the shelter 
of the trees. Inu'a serves as an interpreter to the clan's Holy Man, J'Maari, and explains the following to visitors:

"J'Maari is not King. Rather he is the quill of our feather, the center from which the rest of us spread. The quill holds its feather together. But if you look at the feather very closely, you will see that it is made up of many smaller parts - you will see that, just as there are many spokes growing out from the center, there are many centers from which the spokes grow out. And just as one feather cannot make a bird fly, so we must be many feathers together to raise our clan to better mind, better action, better spirit. Better being. 
To make another analogy, J'Maari is the center of our Circle, the center of our people. There are many circles around us - the circle of the wind, which lives in the circle of the sky... the circle of the seasons, which live in the circle of the earth. The circle of emergence from the white egg when we are born, and the disappearance into the dark circle of the tomb when we go back into the womb of the earth. The center of the circle must look to all its other parts - so it is with our people, that the center is no greater and no more powerful than any other part."


Ou-Ti Dancers, Illustrations 9x12

$300 each 

25% of each purchase goes to Earth Initiatives at Global Green
Globalgreen.org


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