Symbolism Lost and Found

October 31, 2016

“Who drinks the wine
Should take the dregs; even in the bitter lees and sediment
New discovery may lie. The deer in that beautiful place lay down their
bones: I must wear mine.”

-Robinson Jeffers, The Deer Lay Down Their Bones

In my last post, I introduced the new series that I’ve started work on, Undying World. This time around, I wanted to build on some of the criticism I received from those images.

With this image, I see the crow against the lovely minimalism of winter. For others, it was moody, ominous and dark; directly at odds with the idea of hope of things which do not pass away and things that are worth preserving in the world. That’s where we get into some tricky ideas of personal symbolism. For me, winter is the fallow state before the land is reborn, the sleep before reawakening, in its depths, as worthy of its own celebration as the height of summer. This isn’t a great stretch as far as metaphor goes. Crows however, have some very established symbolism of harbingers, tricksters, and death. They are not so for me. I’ll leave the why for another day, but crows have for me a complicated symbolism of balance, humor, and all things being as they should. And that’s where the trouble comes in. Do I craft an image true to my own vision or make something less of me and more universal?

I don’t entirely have an answer for that yet, but it gets me to the week’s work here.

Bones creep folks out. Need a reminder of your own mortality, of brittleness, injury, disease, and things that go bump in the night? Here it is (and you would be far from alone).

But bones have always held a fascination for me. Bones are the graceful and wonderfully strong framework of most living beings. In themselves, they are a jigsaw puzzle, sculptures in their own right. For me they are the persistence of things, sensual in its most homely and earthy sense, love that exists without question. This is why I have been working with bones for the new set, coming up with this image…