One Way to Pleiades

Behind the Art

traveling together through time

I’m incredibly blessed to have sisters. These three people, my womb-mates, have been there for me—and with me—throughout my life, regardless of geographical distance.

My goal with this artwork was to explore how the souls in a family get braided together in a time-travel through lifetimes.

Back in 1983, when I was living in Toronto’s High Park neighborhood, I wrote an ode to my sisters …

i met my sister

I met my sister after we had died.
We had grown together,
Craned our necks across crowds to smile.

The world was fixed in frantic motion,
Slashed and painted, harsh as glass but
We were strong,
Moving in prehistoric bath, and smiling:
An eye within an eye within an eye within.

She had grown young again, a sunny frown
at the disquiet in her body,
Weeping for another sister
Who was calling through the water.

Points of Reason, Lines of Sight:
What are Points of Light but stars' atoms?
Points of Reference, Lines of Divergence:
What are Poles of Disagreement but
Points of View, surveyed from opposite stars in the Heavens?
What are sisters, but Versions of Daughter,
Written as the hand writes an identical character
Never twice the same?"

My sister's face became the moon,
And glazed men's eyes, who saw her.

“And all the other Women, why not look at them
And smile?”

I grew old as the earth, under her new knowledge,
And died with the shards of a million arguments
Inside my voice.

We were born again.
We were not divorced.

the pool shoot

July 2014. My grand nieces Morgan and Sam, excited to participate, offered to play mermaids. Morgan had a sparkly dress and Sam’s was black. As we prepared for the shoot, we decided to explore contrasting energies between the two sisters. We tried various angles and gestures to express sisterhood.

The underwater abstracts were captivating and inspiring, but ultimately confusing. A more gestural approach was dreamlike and enchanting, but too blurry to express personalities through faces.

The flecks of light where the sun replicated itself seemed like a shred of starfield fallen on the swimming pool waters.

At last, we tried floating. I think both Morgan and Sam gained an appreciation for artistic swimming, formerly known as synchronized swimming.

the georgian bay shoot

Before I got my first digital camera, I shot Kodakchrome slides of light on the water at Georgian Bay—part of Lake Huron—known to the Ojibwe as ‘Spirit Lake’ (shown in dark blue below).

I waded far into this vast sandy basin (120 x 50 miles), the warm water barely up to my waist. All afternoon, I was mesmerized by sandy fingerprint-like furrows below the surface, the way the light played on the ripples, the infinite lapping of sun over waterskin over sand. In the pre-digital era, you had to wait for the lab to develop your film. When I got the slides back, I was overjoyed to have captured specular phenomena from starbursts to refraction rainbows.

To date, the Georgian Bay photos are the most used images in my entire photo library, rendering endless metaphysical effects, depending on how they are layered in Photoshop. I continue to be inspired by these impermanent phenomena and how they express transformations in time and space.

the pleiades

Did you know that Subaru, yes - the car manufacturer- is the Japanese name for Pleiades? This NASA image from the Hubble telescope is one of my favorites. I love the filagree circlet and crosshairs around each star, as though each is an orb, an inter-dimensional portal, or the origin of its own Cartesian coordinate system.

what i thought as i created

Where did we come from before we were born? And why is it that stars in the night sky give us such a feeling of eternity, familiarity, and ‘home?’

Creating this piece evoked a powerful experience: floating with my sisters in ink-dark water, star-gazing. You could see the constellations from our backyard swimming pool, off an island in Deer Lake, or from my sister’s hot tub in The County. We would hunt for the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, the Seven Sisters. At camp on Lake Boshkung in the Algonquin Highlands, we felt we could just reach out and grasp a handful of stars. We looked up and remembered, knowing we came from that starry sky, somehow.

The author/artist (left) with her three sisters near Brighton, ON.

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