(a poem for the work of non-being, of un-becoming)

I know, now, what I am craving; and it’s emptiness.

Maybe that’s what the finish line looks like in my head.

No room for anything but everything.

(Fewer words, longer silences.)

A hollowness within, that merges with the hollowness around me. 

The hollowness of the universe.

The thinning out of the self,

becoming nothing more than a translucent and porous membrane.

A bubble skin

containing only space,

where the space

(hollowness)

(emptiness)

(non-being)

is the point.

I am a smallness within the expansiveness that is god,

standing alone in a massive stone cathedral,

all Gregorian echoes

and Vermeer light.

I am losing my self in the work of non-being.

Distilled.

Essential.

Pure.

The nothing that is everything.

Wendy Stefansson

the angles that animate....

Wendy Stefansson. Lioness and Cub. Stoneware. 1996

Decades ago, I carved one of my first three-dimensional artworks out of a block of clay. The piece depicted a lioness nuzzling her cub; and was based on a photo I had taken during a then-recent trip to Africa. I decided the work was finished while it was still in a fairly rough state. A sketch. The basic lines and angles mapped out, but few details. Evocative; not literal.

I glazed it with a “mystery glaze” my friends and I had inherited along with a large number of glaze-making chemicals from another ceramic studio which had closed. The glaze “broke” over the angles, and pooled in the low places; spread and bubbled like lava over the larger planes. It took on the look of stone. Molten. Solidified.

I loved the way the “lines” I had left in the carving — the edges of my cut marks — were preserved and highlighted by the glaze. I couldn’t have said why, but I loved the hard edges.

Wendy Stefansson. Lioness and Cub. Stoneware. 1996

Wendy Stefansson. Lioness and Cub. Stoneware. 1996

___________________________________________

Other artists have rendered cats in this faceted way as well. Particularly the big cats.

Rosetta. On the Alert. Bronze.

Rosetta. The Leap. Bronze.

Julie Taylor and Michael Curry. Simba mask for The Lion King.
Mixed media.

Feline forms seem to fracture along fault lines. Excess shears away like slabs of sandstone, leaving only the essential.

There is a sense of violence barely contained. Lines and edges become the meeting places of opposing energies, held temporarily in equilibrium. Tension, held in suspension.

And in that moment, it’s the angles that animate.

music box dancer....

Wendy Stefansson. Music Box Dancer. Photogram on silver gelatine paper. 2003

When I was a kid, my girlfriends and I all had little jewellery boxes that played music when you opened the lids. Inside, there was a tiny figure of a ballerina — always in a pink tutu, always en pointe — which would pop up and pirouette. Most of the time the music was from Swan Lake.

Behind the tiny dancer was always a small mirror. As girls, we would view our own images in the mirrors with the ballerinas in front of them. Standing between us and our reflections was this idea of what it meant to be a girl.

_________________________________________________________________

On March 8th, 2003 — International Women’s Day — Canada’s National Post newspaper published a fashion editorial about a look I believe they described as “ballerina grunge.” It was part ballet-inspired, part bohemian. Part wabi sabi — the beautiful in the imperfect, the tattered and the bedraggled. The elegant in the earthy. The feminine in the flawed.

I was working in the darkroom quite a lot at the time, and started playing around with the newspaper pages, using them to make photograms — a technique in which one exposes light-sensitive paper through or around a readymade object. In this case, the clippings.

Some of the images on one side of the newsprint lined up in interesting ways with images on the reverse. In one instance, a small image of a dancer overlapped with a closer-up image of the same dancer’s upper body and face. It looked like the music box of my childhood, but all grown up and a little bit darker. A little more fraught.

One of about a million moments in my life of reinterpreting what it means to occupy a female body in this world.

out of the ashes...

Wendy Stefansson. Out of the Ashes. Slip-cast porcelain, pit fired. 1996

This is a piece about resurrection.

It is a fragment of male torso -- possibly a crucifix -- cast in white porcelain, then fired in a “pit” full of combustibles. It’s the smoke from this process that causes the random and subtle colouration on the surface. I literally lifted it out of the ashes after the fire had died, and found it was in pieces. I glued the pieces back together and assembled them on a board for strength. It was a bit like being an archaeologist, reassembling the fragments of an earlier creation; an earlier being. Like being a god, re-creating it, giving it new life.

spinal column....

Wendy Stefansson. Spinal Column.
Pit-fired white stoneware clay,
wood supports. 1999.

This sculpture is intended to evoke the human spinal column. In it I am playing with ideas about life and death; about permanence and impermanence. On one hand, bones symbolize a belief in resurrection, a belief in spirit, because they outlast the flesh of our bodies. They are as eternal as any part of our corporeal being. And on the other hand, bones represent danger, death and mortality. (Think of the Jolly Roger. Think of the symbol for poison.) Death and life integral to the same totality.

At the same time, in both its form and its construction (the clay “vertebrae” are supported internally by a small tree), this sculpture references the axis mundi: the world tree, the mythical centre of the world, the connection between heaven and earth and the meeting place of the four directions. (T. S. Eliot: “at the still point of the turning world, there the dance is.”) The point at the centre of our being that pins us to the earth; and the upward striving of our erect-walking, god-seeking, whirling dervish species.

Perhaps it even references the cross.

full circle...

Peter Gabriel and Sting. Rock, Paper, Scissors tour, July 24, 2016, Edmonton.
Photo by Greg Southam for the Edmonton Journal.

Sting and Peter Gabriel ~ I had the awesome privilege of seeing these two beautiful men performing together the night before last. Their music is from my youth, but timeless. They made me feel the lightness of long ago; the presentness of the past....

Here we are,

come full circle.

Back to the fresh, cool, unbreathed air of youth.

Back to the blue-black sky; the Unknown depicted in the stars.

Here we are,

weightless as innocence,

as innocents;

shed of the burden of our own culpability,

the mistakes we wear like scars.

Here we are,

come full circle,

back to the eternality of youth;

existing outside of time.

The ever-expanding universe, 

and we at the centre of it.

Wendy Stefansson

2016-07-26

chalkmarks in a rainstorm....

Wendy Stefansson. Chalkmarks in a Rainstorm. 1997

Early one afternoon walking through Paris, I found an image bathed in Vermeer light and spring rain:

The Girl with a Pearl Earring, re-created by a chalk artist on the pavement.

Re-created by the elements.

Re-created by me on black and white film.

Anonymous and abandoned.

(The title of this work and this post are borrowed and adapted from Joni Mitchell's 1988 album.)

kundalini....

Wendy Stefansson. Kundalini. Acrylic on Canvas. 2000

Kundalini is derived from an ancient Sanskrit term meaning, “coiled up like a snake.”  In yogic practice, the image of a snake rising from the sacrum and coiling up the spine is one of spiritual awakening, and is associated with the “mothering intelligence.”  Outside of Christian mythology, the snake is widely associated with the concepts of death and rebirth, because of its ability to shed its skin and emerge newly made.  In this painting, I have combined the image of the snake with the image of the rose -- also a spiral, as well as a symbol of feminine sexuality.  What I am trying to say is that as women, our spirituality and our bodies are inextricably intertwined; from the pelvis where new life begins to the mind (at the top of the spine) our understanding of the universe is awakened and informed by our experience of living in female, cyclical, life-giving bodies.

footprints in my own dust....

Every step forward

is a step away from the beginning,

a step closer to the end;

each one a loss as well as a gain.

Every step forward

contains within it a grieving

for what we leave behind,

can never have again,

can never be

again.

And I am too old

to believe it can all be done over,

too old to believe

in my own immortality,

watching the dust collect around me.

But I am just old enough to be grateful

that I have walked such a journey

with such friends,

that I have lived in such times,

that I have been given such a life,

and that I am still walking,

that the journey isn’t over,

that I can still

leave footprints in my own dust.

Wendy Stefansson

we have made a faith of our doubt....

We have made a faith of our doubt,

erected an altar to our uncertainty.

Here,

we say,

is something we can honestly believe in.

grace is....

Photo byWendy Stefansson.

Grace is looking down

and finding up.

the fragility of freedom....

Photo and text by Wendy Stefansson

the god loop....

Time.
It is everything we have
and nothing at all.
It exists in light and in consequences; 
immeasurable and absolutely finite.
It is the axis around which 
everything spins,
and it is the spinning itself.

(And we,
we are just the dizzy inhabitants
of a spinning planet;
days and lives measured in the turning.)

And god?

God, too. 
God is everything we have
and nothing at all.


Wendy Stefansson
2014-10-16

haiku on the theme of a paper bag....

Wendy Stefansson. Paper Bag. Charcoal on paper (sepia toned after scanning), 1996.

Somebody get me 

a paper bag. I need to breathe

in, breathe out, repeat.

life is a room with a view....

Wendy Stefansson. I See (Life is a Room with a View).
Digitally manipulated and combined photos of my eye,
and the sky I could see.  2014

Swallow the sky whole.

Contain it

and let it shine out through

your sweet, transparent skin.

June 19, 2010

Pierrot

Hazel Evans. Face It Pierrot! Self-portrait with face paint. 2012
Read more about image, artist and process here.

Mascara rivers

drain the salt pools of my eyes,

leaking bruises down my face.

More about Pierrot here.

on endings….

I love the book-within-a-book thing that John Green has going on in The Fault in our Stars.

I love how Hazel finds her own story in Anna’s story, in An Imperial Affliction. How she is able to accept that Anna’s story stops in the middle of a sentence, because that’s how life stops. How her life will stop. With all kinds of thoughts and in fact a whole existence unfinished.

Incomplete but done.

What she can’t live with is not knowing what Anna’s death does to the others in her story. Does Anna’s mother move to Amsterdam with the Rich Tulip Man? Is he legit, or is he a con? And what happens to Sisyphus the hamster?

Hazel apologizes to Van Houten, the book's author, for asking him such non-literary questions, but that’s the point. For her, it’s not just a book. It’s her life story and she wants to know the ending; she wants to know how her story will end for the people in her life whom she can’t help but hurt.

Hazel’s greatest fear is that she is a grenade. That when she goes, she will take others with her. And that’s what she can’t live with.

Van Houten can’t give her the ending she wants because he is the collateral damage that she doesn’t want anybody else to be. He is the walking wounded of his own daughter’s detonation. Of his own life’s grenade.

So he insists on oblivion. Something Hazel understands on some level. Something Augustus fears above all else.

Augustus tries to write for Hazel the ending to Van Houten’s story, but can’t. Instead he writes for her her eulogy, saving her from his fears. And she writes him his. In the end, she doesn’t deliver it -- not the way she told it to him. Because in the end, funerals are for the living and she is the one who has to go on living, saving him from her fears.

Each of them gets to live with the things they can’t live with.

In the end Augustus leaves his mark, if only as a wound. He is the grenade that goes off in Hazel's life. And Hazel finds out that it is possible to live -- that she can live -- with the pain.

In the end, “The marks humans leave are too often scars.” (John Green)





See more about The Fault in our Stars, here or here.

The Fault in our Stars

Alternative movie poster by ZCxART. Available on etsy.com.

This is a beautiful story, a hilarious story, and an unflinchingly honest story; a comedy, a tragedy, and an elegy all at once because that's the way life is. And death even more so. 

It's a book about too-short lives, unredeemed by their too-great suffering. Not ennobled by pain, but disabled by it. Diminished by it. Demeaned by it.

About the unheroic act of simply dying. Not dying well, or dying tragically. (Tragedy is for the living.) Just dying.

Most importantly it’s a book about humanity; about two people. About Hazel and Augustus.

And small, unlikely infinities cradled within the crushing context of time.

Read more about The Fault in our Stars here or here.

the cave whose walls we first painted on....

Mark Rothko. Central triptych of the Rothko Chapel,
Houston, Texas. Oil on canvas. 1966

The Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas.

1

This is the art of the beginning and the end.

Of the darkness of the womb,

coloured only by faint washes 

of light through flesh,

through blood.

Of the darkness of the galaxies,

or even darker.

Of space before time, 

and time after space.

Of the vast absence

broken only by faint clouds of dust.

The dust of stars that is our origins.

The dust of flesh that is our end.

2

This is the art of the innermost and the outermost.

Of our deepest within

and our farthest reach.

3

This is the dark, hollow music

of the Gregorian chant.

The thick stone walls of a Roman church.

And farther back.

This is the cave whose walls we first painted on.

4

This is the silent singing of blood in our ears.

The blood we are born in,

and our own quickened pulse.

The blood that will someday still,

and pool,

and cool in our veins.

5

This is the darkness

that surrounds us, 

that contains us.

That is us,

and is not us.

That is our essence

and our context, 

our matrix and our end.

Our forever more,

and our never was, 

and 

-- briefly --

our now.

6

This is the darkness

that gives meaning to the light.



Wendy Stefansson

red...

Albert Molina and Eddie Redmayne as abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko and his assistant, Ken.
2010 Broadway production of John Logan's play, Red.

Red: A New Play by John Logan

Okay, I think we can all agree that the Peace Country is off-off-OFF-Broadway. Which means most of us won’t get the opportunity to see John Logan’s play Red, a drama about abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko any time soon. Happily, we can read the script of the play. Even more happily, we can see clips of the Broadway production on youtube.

If I could, I would go see this play ten evenings in a row just to watch the scene in which Rothko and his young assistant, Ken, together prime a large canvas in a deep maroon; the older man covering the top of the canvas, the younger the bottom. The sheer physicality of painting is rendered as a dance, as a struggle. Both men emerge from it covered with red paint. They look like they’ve just come newborn into the world, or from a battlefield.

Red depicts Rothko at the height of his success but staring down the spectre of his own irrelevance. He is in love with, and at the same time tortured by his own ideas. Even as he creates the canvases that are arguably the culmination of his life’s work -- all in pulsating, throbbing, swelling, breathing reds -- he contemplates his own end.

This is clearly a dark work. It’s also a seriously intelligent work. It presumes the audience has a good general knowledge of art history from Michelangelo through to Warhol. But, at the same time it reminds us that painting isn’t just a cognitive activity; it is something to be grappled with bodily. It is hand-to-hand combat. It is, and always has been, a struggle to the end.

This article was first published in Art of the Peace magazine, Issue #15, Fall 2010. See it in its original context here.