The Beginning...

After wrestling with using materials I am not familiar with and with which I need more tool/machine shop practice, I reverted back to the beginning--to source--to find inspiration and the feeling of quiet, peaceful, birth.

I wanted a calm sense of the beginning of life and end/death and so I created these two final collages in my series using mostly natural elements and all found objects.

The Birth collage was part of a meditation for me on creating and reflecting on that process so I included some of the pieces I did as part of that process. I sometimes overthink and overdo so this was about keeping a simple, clean idea and letting that have power rather than adding too much and over complicating. The top 3 pronged wood pieces represent the cycle's process--birth, life, & death.

In the center is the womb, the source, the tree of life and the "egg" or core, seed of living things represented here by an avocado pit. If you have never looked at an avocado pit while it is still moist they are beautiful--my cell camera does it no justice here. It is a work of art in itself--with a grainy deep wood look. For the circle I used the crochet round which to me adds the feeling of things being closed and opened as in birthing a baby and the circle being completed in a tangible way with the metal screw. I could have used the plain wood circle but I liked that meaning and effect. The circle is surrounded by white feathers (again, sorry for the lousy camera work) and obviously protecting the birth and extending/radiating outwards as the many stages and extensions of a life.

The bottom has a nest of salt and an amethyst representing the birth of the elements and all things from the elements, the rock and salts of the earth, the crystals that shape and form all of life and in which life embeds itself. The top right is a flower from dry garlic skin and the left fur is wrapped onto the branch frame to represent the animals and food that provides and grows as the birth of the earth. My other versions of the womb used eggs that were blown (center blown out) and leaves planted within and the more basic, zen elements of the avocado pit as life seed and maple leaf as nature's birth.