I CHING GALLERY

Catalog Paper Horses

The Paper Horses are limited series woodblock seriographs ritually printed on Chinese paper that contain a bit of the magic of the old sacred cosmos. The images are taken from artifacts that have emerged from the old tombs and modeled on figures from Yijing, the Classic of Change.

Characters

Our Destiny is the Bright Omen that Heaven gives us as we enter this world, the All-Under-Heaven. It is our connection to the process of time and it is our task to discover and realize the ancestral potential it contains.

Cosmologies of Change

The tradition or Way of the Classic of Change is like a great stream of symbols flowing back and forth through the present moment to connect the wisdom of ancient times with whatever the future may be. It is a language that everything speaks; through it everything is always talking to everything else. Things are always vanishing and coming into being, a continual process of creation that becomes knowable or readable at the intersection points embodied in the symbols of this language. These symbols or images of Change open a sacred cosmos that has acted as a place of close encounter with the spirit world for countless generations. Without this sort of contact our world shrinks and fades away, leaving us in a deaf and dumb wasteland, forever outside of things.

The New Horses

This is a new and ongoing series of Horses using a large block outline technique of carving. They are designed for ritual work, each seeking to invoke a particular and powerful state of awareness. The inspiration for these was a strange combination of things. I was re-reading Kristofer Schipper’s great book Taoist Body about the Corpse Spirits in our bones that want to kill us in order to return to the earth as I went through the extraction of several nasty old teeth. At a full moon ceremony I was told to pick up a prayer stick and ask the moon for her blessings. As I went to the work of my constant inspiration, Max Ernst, I saw the demons form in the gnarls of the prayer stick and knew I had to find a different way of carving to give them images.

The Way of Living Change

The tradition or Way of the Classic of Change is like a great stream of images or symbols flowing back and forth through the present moment to connect the wisdom of ancient times with whatever the future may be. It is a kind of language that everything speaks; through it everything is always talking to everything else. Things are constantly vanishing and coming into being, a continual process of creation that becomes knowable or readable at the intersection points embodied in its symbols. Without this language our world shrinks and we are left in a deaf and dumb wasteland, forever outside of things.

The Eight Trigram Spirits

Numinous Spirit is mysteriously active in all things.

Through this spirit change and transformation can occur

And the fates of all things come to their perfection.