Harmony of the Spheres
This sculptural quartet venerates the sacred bonds we hold with our spinning planetary habitat. A sphere is a whole entity and its circumference draws a boundary that references continuum.
Seeded one bead at a time, basketballs are transformed into beguiling artifacts. The echo of the ball is retained in shape but it has undergone a transmutation in patterning to explore the tensions held in paradox.
This series emerged during the global pandemic while concentric waves of multiple crises revealed themselves.
"Working with the form of the ubiquitous basketball allows me to meditate on the object's symbolic meaning. As I circumambulate each ball, bead by bead, panel by panel, the swooping lines blur in their meaning. Are they abstract divisions or irrefutable interconnections, boundaries, fault lines, veins or golden energetic pathways?
Through my own creative ritual, a slow moving transmutation takes place. Bead by bead the micro meets the macro and a playful object becomes a sacred artifact of contemplation and reverence.
‘Harmony of the Spheres’ is an invitation to play with a shifting of orientations and perspectives. What barriers are blocking us from awakening to our personal and collective power? ”
ALIVE
Alive with blooming, evolving natural processes, the generation from pollen spore to pink-petalled cosmic flower is depicted. At once ordered and chaotic, patterns emerge from the atomic to the astronomical through fractals, spirals, foam, waves, tiling, cracks, flows and meanders that harmonize with nature.
Materials: Basketball, beeswax and pine resin, crystal, glass, and metallic seed beads.
2022
AGAPE
Agape is the divine and selfless love of charity and care for others. The world in need of our stewardship and care is projected in topographical view of heights and depths inlaid on the orb. What was formerly dribbled, tossed, dunked and slammed is transformed into a delicately iridescent, ethereal mystery.
Materials: Basketball, beeswax and pine resin, crystal, glass, and metallic seed beads
2022
AWARE
Initially ‘Aware’ was inspired by the humble sea urchin, found on all five continents. Slow and methodical, they can show us how to manoeuvre with tenacity and patience. As the work evolved at the height of the global pandemic, the issue of boundaries, while sharing a collective planetary experience, became more poignant and divisive.
The final iteration of the sculpture is both reminiscent of a microscopic image of a virus, and an aerial view of individuals isolated from one another. The golden pathways concurrently illuminate a harmonic convergence of a new strain of emerging consciousness.
Materials:
Basketball, beeswax and pine resin, crystal, glass, and metallic seed beads
2022
AWAKE
‘Awake’ utilizes an Olympic basketball, a form used intentionally as a fitting metaphor for the “oneness” of our world. A crystalline saturnian planet is bound by orbital rings and the unity of its colours expands in four directions from pointed arrows over the surface of the sphere. A mother of pearl heirloom makes up the centre of an eye that opens and shuts while the air inflating the form breathes itself.
Materials:
Basketball, beeswax and pine resin, crystal, glass, and metallic seed bead, mother of pearl heirloom.
2023
