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Beyond The Labyrinth
The sgraffito method used to create the images in this series is a surrender to the creative process. This image started as an oil pastel that was then completely covered in black tempera paint, with the hopes that it would reemerge with more character. Through scratching into the shadowy blackness, I reveal the oil pastel below. In this way textures, details, and a more complex image evolves. This process is symbolically meaningful to me and makes the work more potent. It represents the beauty that is found once we have accepted our own discovery process.
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The labyrinth is a symbol I have been working with throughout this life. While my family and I lived in Pennsylvania, there was a park just out my front door that had a labyrinth in it. In 2011, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and then 2 months later I was diagnosed with appendix cancer. I recited meditations while walking that labyrinth that centered me and helped me understand that I was getting to my own center through this process. It was a representation of that inward spiral, all the while I was unsure if I would get to come back out.
It was a long, hard process to navigate the labyrinth’s spiral, more cancers, death, grief, recovery and finally, rebirth. In 2014, I had a vision of the labyrinth with an ouroboros around it. But the snake was not actually eating its tail; it had released it and there was an opening… a way out of the spiraling. This piece is a meditation on that energy. The idea that, once we have found the center and worked our way back into the light, there is an opening to so much more. Beyond the labyrinth, there is a life we cannot access until we have been initiated through its spiral dance and confronted with the Minotaur at the center. If we can re-emerge and release all that took us into the labyrinth to begin with, life opens in ways we could not even imagine before.
