Sometimes the story gets away from you. The writer must always remember, the story is a wild, living, feral creature who cannot be contained. Such a thing happened to me after chapter 7 and as I attempt to explain it to you, my friends, in draft after draft, it slips from my sight and mocks me and scorns me and yells at me not to touch it and to look away.
Alright alright, I will not explain myself and my actions but instead, effort to coax it into language once more.
In between chapter 7 and this interlude, I experienced a healing. An alchemy in my own soul between the ones who birthed me, in between their love and their hate, their dichotomous beliefs and me caught in the middle with just my little heart wanting so damn bad to be cherished by them. Spending a life time attempting to reconcile them inside of myself so that I could have peace, absolution, release.
In chapter 7, the story of my life reveals my parents opposition, my drive to alchemize it, and my wide reaching vision to bring this alchemy to the culture at large via my art. After writing that, revealing it to myself as I revealed it to you, I had to create. I had to engage with it in matter, in my body, in my birthing the art medicine demanding to come through. So I did. And I made a film record of the process on instagram, which I will link to the images below so you can follow the tread of this circuitous tale in seven small films.
In this first film I am all awash with the fresh love of a new creation and my plans to take it to the world stage. I giggle now, one month later, at my precious fool of a past self, with me and my Aries moon already running well into our next extra fabulous, world illuminating project. Nevertheless, the alchemy was spot on. This work is a working. Magick was done and the art is its record, and these films are its record and you are our witness. This is an alchemy the collective labors and groans for and this spirit will always reside in the work I do in this world.
In this second film the story winds backwards into my childhood and the separation between Science and Spirit, inside of me. The composition of the piece begins. First circles are drawn. The wind howls in the trees. I’m batting my eyelashes at the camera…
Saturn conjuncts my North Node in Virgo in the 5th house and I relish even the very most boring moments of art making.
And here is where I realize I am SO FREAKED OUT by all the intense pressure I have put on myself with this piece that I am going to seriously damage it beyond all repair if I don’t loosen the f up. At which point, I wax artist philosophy about AI and successfully talk myself out of taking my art and myself so.damn.seriously.
and here in vlog 5, as predicted, the damage occurs, I put the planets on the wrong rings and then, I try to erase on xuan paper! Chaos is tired of waiting its turn and I understand this, my oldest friend. So I accept it. I walk away. I tend to my humanity and that night the piece whispers to me where it is taking me. The next day I hop on it’s ride again and here we go!
🎼 welcome to your life 🎼 I am only nominally pleased with the duendes choices for this wild sun in the center of Dr. Tyson’s Solar System, but now I am firmly in the grip of its flow, so nothing to do except let it take me.
And then it all drops off. Documentation takes an abrupt, two and a half week pause. And it’s so interesting to me that I was unable to continue documenting at this point. I mean yes, I did start my period. And yes, I was down to the wire to complete it and also prepare for my trip to NORWAC, and those things are very practical considerations. But! And also, what is most interesting to me, is that this moment was where the careful, meticulous control phase was fully over and here chaos rules, and chaos did NOT want to be talked about while in process! In fact, I feel quite lucky I was able to find the presence of mind to film it at all. So here it is, between all of that I journeyed to and arrived back home from Seattle, and once I returned created the final vlog:
And this is where I leave you today, my friends, with a couple photos of the final piece and a fond farewell until next time. I am nearing the end of the Shadowbox Memoirs, with just a couple few chapters left to go, and then I will see where Hermes takes me on this writing ship at sea. Thank you for reading, welcome new subscribers and so much love to you all out there in the wilderness of 2024 xoxo, Eve.
The below image is the artwork before I mount it on the scroll.
And here it is mounted on the hand made Chinese scroll, from Henri Li of Blue Heron Arts, with my star signature on the bottom; the completed piece.
If you are interested in a custom StarMap scroll for yourself of a gift, you can view the gallery of previous works and also find them in my shop, all on Evening Star Maps website.