I Walk on Land
I Walk on Land 1995 Materials: pastel on paper On the Big Island of Hawaii, I went to a place where the red hot lava pours into the ocean. There the four elements meet to create steam and new stone. At night the billowing steam glows red. Hundreds of us watched, day and night, the beginnings of the earth, and our metaphoric birth as land animals. Fire and earth move like water, then meet the water to become stone. Water crashes up against the lava and becomes volatile: merges with the air as steam. Somehow this story lives in our bodies. As biological beings we understand that kind of clash and transformation. After walking over miles of lava flow, it dawned on me that most of the earth is liquid, molten rock. Even the thin crust we stand on is always shifting. Our “grounding”, then, is with fluid. Our stability is really more like surfing. Billions of years ago when our evolutionary ancestors crawled out of the sea, we left the oceanic environment forever. Now we carry an internal ocean that helps us balance in this world of air and ground. These drawings map this experience.