Rocks are forming part of my art practice here at the art residency in Skagaströnd, visually defining a feminine aesthetic. I see them, I walk on them, I feel into them. I draw them. I dance on them. I am one, because I am a mother.
Walking to the studio, along the cliff edge or down by the beach I collect glistening specimens. Body parts display themselves outwardly through each plane and angle. Cool to touch, sharp and eroded, they wreak of embedded emotionality and speak to the intelligent feminine portal. I am seeing with the body, attuning with the inherent language of rocks. They are our bones, the crystallisation of thought. I dig deep into a pot of Linum usitatissimum. Not to be confused with cold-pressed sesame oil used for a scalp to toe covering in Ayurveda. A dotted print prepares a ground of tissue and I invite colour because each rock I found was carrying their own story of northern light. Lit by rock, my inner ecosystem stirs. Mountain water tumbles, rich with elaborate minerals. Quivering and gushing. My expectant mouth lurches to let gold seep through burgeoning channels. Filtering buds pick up a sulphuric undertone, the odour of the gas hydrogen sulphide. Rocks are potent. Volcanic and plutonic, they are the elemental underworld. It is all in the magma. Earth gives birth and I am surrounded by her debris.
A rock defines a spot with a seemingly inert alertness, a silent resolute authority. Vikings devised a GPS system out of them. Cairns litter the landscape lighting the way over heath and highland. It seems that human beings, bent on destroying the joint, are opting for a move to Mars as Earth deteriorates beyond repair. Iceland has Palagonite formations quite similar to our neighbour; a loose, glassy material packed full of smectites and zeolites and calcites that give off a luminosity. I try to bring some of this into my work, hence the linseed, the essential oil of truth.