GILDED LAVA ROCKS

The Upper Rio Grande Valley is a sci-fi landscape, littered with cataclysmic events, molten, porous, black, lava rock shards of the explosive volcanic eruption that shook this valley one and half million years ago. This striking landscape opens into the psyche, scaling our humanness in the face of such an event that lies sharp at your feet. It’s easy to see this landscape in Paleolithic terms, massaging the primal memory inherent in this terrain. Collecting rocks has been a method of connecting to the earth since I was very small. I remember excavating crystals and special stones along walks and keeping them like little magical allies in my pocket and on my bedside. I remember being deeply struck by these black rocks years ago, arriving in New Mexico, and thinking I must make something. There are miles of these cryptic land formations of strewn lava fields broken by wind and time, hardly accessible for cacti and ‘goat heads’ - sharp burrs that scratch a life out of this hardened place. The individual stones seem to carry the story of this vastness of time and space. They have an intrinsic story and weighted power that culls a sense of geologic time. I wanted to illuminate that power – to select rocks and acknowledge their inherent history – mark them as special and name them for their shape.

New science suggests that the gold deposits on earth are the result of the explosion or collision of neutron stars, millions of years ago. So by the accounts of modern science, we are carbon star structures and our jewelry is made from collided neutron stars. It is a cosmological factor of science, in a rationally driven culture. A culture that seems to have lost the capacity to design and communicate through time and space as early man has clearly proven to be quite capable of. Illuminating certain facets or lines within the rocks by gilding with 24k gold, outlines this power and activates these sculptures as talismans. The gold adds value to the invaluable formation of nature.

I find the names embedded in the stones, shapes that remind me of Sanskrit words. Sanskrit is a language of seed syllables. Each bindu (seed) of the word has a specific vibration/resonance that is conjured in sound. The power of the name and the sound resonate in meaning and in space, creating an actual wave pattern of communication, a coded signal sent into the ether. This is Jappa, reciting a mantra and repetition of sounds that sets a karmic wheel of transformation into motion. This is the power of prayer. In naming these stones, I offer them as a scepter of time; Relegating them to a power beyond our human consciousness and influencing our power to be part of greater transformation.

I think of gold as a representation of the alchemy of time itself. I unite the gold and the stone in an effort to reanimate its legacy. The idea of balancing and illuminating, marking and honoring are present in this process.