In these early images from the mid-1960s, the nocturnal hours created a feeling of enchantment, of the known transformed into the unknown. This feeling paralleled the experience of working secretively, or so it often seemed, in the dark chamber where black-and-white prints are made.

When night falls, for an enchanted moment we step through Alice’s looking glass to find on the other side a wonderland of inky black skies and enchanted objects floating in pools of light. Illuminated by artificial light sources, the ordinary and familiar are effortlessly transformed, appearing at once extraordinarily unfamiliar. All through the night, the physical partakes of the metaphysical. A graveyard crew earth-moving project appears suspended in time on the surface of the moon. A vacant car wash assumes the form of a predatory creature from the Pleistocene Epoch. A miniature golf course recalls a dense Rousseau painting alive with startling plant forms and unusual water sources. A solitary woman sits alone in a sea of tents, a visionary moment suspended in the very soul of the night.

My great-great-grandmother knitted by the fragile glow of gas lanterns. In her time, once the sun set, the powerful presence of night dominated the fragile light sources created by human hand. Today, while the constellations dance overhead, the night landscape is shattered by powerful light sources that transform night into day and compete with the stars and planets of the night sky.

 . . . Listen to the murmurings of the night, for the fragments of our lost dreams evaporate with dawn.

Made in hospitals and medical centers, the photographic prints in Vital Signs from the 1970s explore human frailty and vulnerability in the face of illness and death. Funded in part by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Slip back in time, and recall our distant ancestors, hearts filled with hope, fear, and belief, bowing their heads as they passed through a low, narrow entry into a darkened interior where a tribal shaman held the medicinal wisdom of his or her time. The healing hands that held their fate carried the knowledge of herbs, roots, barks, berries, and incantations handed down from one generation to another.

In the opening years of the twenty-first century, glass, marble, and concrete mark our entrance into a remarkable, sophisticated, rapidly evolving world of contemporary medicine. Caught in an intimidating web spun of technological strands from different disciplines of medicine, we submit to treatment and for a suspended moment feel like the captive prey of an exotic predator. We find we have entrusted our healing to complex medical technology that in appearance often feels alarmingly more medieval than modern. Now, unlike in distant times, we share our individual, private experience of our own mortality with strangers. We embrace the medical wisdom of our time, knowing as we do that inevitably we will feel—and we will be—alone. 

. . . Enmeshed in technology, medicine seeks to mend and repair a flawed body it knows to be priceless and irreplaceable.

Celebrating the clown, aerialists, and animal trainers who form the heart and backbone of the circus, this portfolio, published in 1979 and funded in part by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, contains photographs introduced by written reflections of the artist.

Backstage

The circus is a psychological microcosm in which human aspirations and absurdity are symbolized by the daring of the aerialist’s flight and the indignity of the clown’s tumble. With a duck-waddle gait, a dwarf in outrageous attire passes an extravagantly costumed and coiffed female performer whose bared back is contoured with the richly developed muscles of an aerialist. The circus embraces with equal ease the world of the “little people” and the exceptionally beautiful and daring. In a backstage corridor of a concrete and glass amphitheater, a woman in black net stockings, silver slippers, and a red and silver sequined costume, sculpted to reveal muscled buttocks and ample bosom, rocks her infant child in an old-fashioned pram. Twenty feet away lies a train of cages quartering lions. Moments later she joins a teeterboard troupe that catapults her in a double backward somersault to the top of a human ladder five men high.

The people of the circus are the gypsies of our time: moving frequently as an entire family from city to city; maintaining unconventional hours; and preserving a tradition of esoteric, difficult, and potentially dangerous skills. The odor of their animals, who are of necessity always quartered nearby, permeates the feathered, spangled, and brilliantly hued costumes, creating an incongruous fusion of finery and animal stench. Chance encounters and conversations unfold in directions impossible to anticipate. I met, one quiet afternoon, a priest who conducted Mass for the Catholic members of the troupe when the circus performed in his city. Years ago, he had raised bees. His current indigenous congregation consisted of longshoremen. When the circus opened, he came daily to watch again and again the same event, the lion act, and in his dark clerical attire he passed freely among the exotically costumed members of the circus.

The three-ringed circus bedazzles and bewilders. It is a celebratory festival that gathers together exhibitions of splendor and pageantry; aerialists and acrobats; high-wire, trampoline, and teeterboard acts; animal trainers and their performing animals, including bears, tigers, elephants, lions, chimpanzees, horses, leopards, cheetahs, and dogs; showgirls and musicians; as well as dwarfs, midgets, and clowns.

. . . In the joyous, absurd romp of painted clowns, we find a reflection of the folly of our own human flaws and foibles.

Published in 1986, the Dioramas portfolio contains seventeen images introduced by written reflections by the artist. The images were made in the grand, now antiquated, natural history collections housed in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

The camera is itself like a diorama, an enclosed, encapsulated box with a window facing outwards, a fragment of a story ensnared within. An inventor of photography, Daguerre, was first a maker of thirty-foot theatrical dioramas large enough to envelop an audience. These remarkable illusions transported their audiences to distant, exotic lands, or propelled them backward through time to the sites of biblical happenings. Camera and diorama, their evolution intertwined at a crucial moment in history, involve a form of voyeurism that makes the unsuspecting spectator a voyageur with a dual destiny. The outer and inner voyage interlock like inseparable Siamese twins, forever coupled together. We find we are unable to look outside of ourselves without simultaneously engaging in an inner voyage. The belief that diorama is solely a product of intellectual inquiry is itself an illusion, for we cannot discover our history without obscuring it through an operatic scrim of descriptive interpretations. Voices from behind seemingly invisible fictional veils tell us, when we listen, as much about the state of our soul as about the subject they describe with such determined faithfulness to fact.

 . . . Diorama and camera alike fulfill our need to suspend time, ensnare stories, and create illusions we cannot and do not wish to forget.

A suite of my drawings made with pastels, graphite, and powdered pigments was shown in 2005 at the Triangle Gallery, where I had my first exhibition of drawings forty-two years earlier. The suite of drawings pays tribute to a deeply felt connection to the natural world anchored in childhood and to the recent passage of one of my fraternal twin brothers.

“Out of the cradle endlessly rocking . . .”—Walt Whitman

Months after the death of one of my fraternal twin brothers, a colleague traveled from his native Japan to visit the pond where my brother’s ashes had been scattered. I was deeply moved to know of the pilgrimage and the distance traveled to fulfill it.

Although I had not yet made the journey, I felt drawn to evoke the essence of a place ringed with reeds, circled by hills; a place of mystery, ultimately unknowable. In my imagination it is touched by the same quiet beauty of the woods, hills, and streams I loved as a child. Through the ceremonial act of making images, I found a way to celebrate childhood memories of being alone in the natural world, of my brother’s continuing presence in my life, and of the wonder of life itself.

Whitman’s poetic voice, anchored in the powerful claim of childhood memories, celebrates the elemental forces of the natural world. His moving image, etched in my psyche, sings of our existential bond with nature. The drawings in the suite Passages are reveries, visual responses to memories of places that call forth the fragile balance of the finite and the infinite, the physical and the metaphysical.

To make these drawings, I covered a spacious work table with containers of graphite dust, powdered pigments, and a ritualistically arranged array of pastels, pencils, and erasers—a collection to which I added weekly. The assortment of materials grew, and I began to think of the surface I worked on, now alive with many shades and hues of black, white, and gray, as a visual field in which the drawings resided and from which they materialized. Symbolic hues, subtle and ephemeral, emerged. I felt a sense of resonance between my work space and the darkened interior of an ancient apothecary’s shop filled with jars and potions.

The surface of the paper felt held in suspension. Moment-to-moment additions of dust, powder, grit, ground pigments, dry and wet, formed enigmatic shapes, textures, and spatial illusions. Like the dust of life carried by the wind, the pigments dissolved and disintegrated. Spontaneous erasures quietly reverberated with metaphorical possibilities. As I worked, I thought of Turner’s paintings and the wonderfully articulate and ambiguous spaciousness contained within them. I thought of the pond I had never seen as it might be experienced by visitations from wind, rain, stars, invisible by day, luminous by night and the passage of time. I thought of the moment when a loving hand held fast my brother’s ashes, the last physical evidence of a lifetime of shared stories, before the wind claimed the offering.

Drawn back in time by the claims of memory, a child once again, I stood wordless with wonder on the edge of an abyss before a great tree uprooted from the earth by a storm. In rare moments when we find our inner being mirrored in the outer world, we feel, and we are, blessed.

 . . . In rare moments when we find our inner being mirrored in the outer world, we feel, and we are, blessed.

“Cycle of Songs” consists of five individual “songs” and represents the culmination of nearly a decade-long pursuit. Each “song” explores a facet of the “feminine” as a force of nature and a source of creativity. In a tribute to Russian icons, which could be ritualistically opened and closed, each work pairs poetry with Cibachrome prints. The small-scale sculptural objects were crafted by Chris Daubert. Walter Sparks developed the concept for the series and provided the design for the printed pages. The poems were typeset by MacKenzie & Harris and letterpress printed on handmade paper fabricated by Magnolia Press.

Kneeling in the center of a clearing, wearing a crown of twigs and leaves, singing softly, a woman cradles a small, vicious black bear in her arms. She knows him at once. His long, curved ivory talons have grown sharp and sullen in captivity. As she touches a blaze of gold on his thick, furrowed brow, she trembles, for she nurtures a demonic changeling. Bones crack, snap, tear free from their moorings, rupturing the silence of the forest after dark. The sound, bestial, primitive, reverberates against the rough bark of a circle of trees that guard the site and witness the deed. She wrings the neck of the shadow shape with her bare hands, as her grandmother once wrung the necks of cocks at dawn.

The ground beneath her shudders. Within the earth echoes the roar of a majestic animal. From the loam arises a great she-bear. The towering beast enfolds the woman in a pelt from her own broad, shaggy back. Bowing her head, the woman accepts the gift. At that moment, the cloud-covered night sky parts. The tips of the pelt shimmer in the reflected light of seven stars, silver ornaments of the guardian of the night sky, and the radiance of Ursa Major anoints the clearing with starlight. The woman of the night dances. The long, dark hairs of her mantle sway, as she circles the clearing chanting. Feet sink into wet earth, leaving the print of the bear with each footfall.

. . . In the rhythmical cycles, inherent mysteries, and primal force of the natural world, we discover and celebrate a feminine principle.

“Cycle of Songs” consists of five individual “songs” and represents the culmination of nearly a decade-long pursuit. Each “song” explores a facet of the “feminine” as a force of nature and a source of creativity. In a tribute to Russian icons, which could be ritualistically opened and closed, each work pairs poetry with Cibachrome prints. The small-scale sculptural objects were crafted by Chris Daubert. Walter Sparks developed the concept for the series and provided the design for the printed pages. The poems were typeset by MacKenzie & Harris and letterpress printed on handmade paper fabricated by Magnolia Press.

THE GIFT

On the Day of the Dead a woman sails through time on a barque of bone. The sacred secrets of life and death fill her womb anew. Traces of the passage of fire outline her empty eyes as they fill with shadows. Bleached bones cradle the memory of the past and nine prayers for the future.

Shadowland is a limited edition of six books, each of which contains a unique final Cibachrome print titled “Winged Grief.” The book is composed of six Cibachrome prints accompanied by two poems and two written reflections by Jacqueline Thurston. The prose, poetry, and images celebrate dreams, memories, and the wonders of the natural world from a feminine perspective. Shadowland opens with “Night of Shadows,” a celebration of the enigmatic nature of dreams and a close encounter between Earth and Mars that occurred in the summer of 2003. “Night of Shadows” is followed by two written reflections: “the Wind Whispers Her Name,” a description of the gift of two artifacts from the era when Indian tribes lived in the hills of Pennsylvania and California; and “Gemini,” a reverie on the nature of the myth and constellation. The book closes with “Winged Grief,” a tribute to the artist’s mother.

The elements in Don Glaister’s abstract design for the cover of Shadowland include snake skin, stingray, ostrich, and silver mesh. Shadowland is housed in a custom-made clam shell box lined with felt. The book is discretely signed with Glaister’s emblematic gold dot. Suzanne Moore painted the doublures for the book. The edition was letterpress printed at Springtide by Jessica Spring. The type is Mrs. Eaves and was printed using photopolymer plates on Revere paper.

Cibachrome prints are rare, archival, and luminous.

In the spring of 2006, I lived for four months as a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt making photographs and writing about images of ancient feminine deities portrayed on tomb and temple walls.

"Sacred Deities takes us on a deeply personal journey to explore both the meaning—always with an eye toward contemporary relevance—and the astonishing beauty of Egyptian art."

Susan Landauer, PhD., Independent art historian and curator. Former Katie and Drew Gibson Chief Curator, San Jose Museum of Art.

MYTHIC WEB

The deities worshipped by this ancient civilization seem to possess an indefinable inner magnetism, a quality that makes an initial encounter with the imagery and the mythology of the culture inexplicably compelling.

Ancient Egyptians created a cosmology populated with goddesses whose stories were inseparable from the stories of the gods. Sacred Deities is an introduction to some of the major gods and goddesses in the pantheon. The mythic stories of these sacred masculine and feminine deities illuminate their unique roles in the pantheon, as well as the complex and often contradictory traditions that governed the nature of their relationship to one another.

In this fascinating pantheon, masculine and feminine sacred deities often had companion figures of the opposite sex who presided over the same domain. The secret spells and rituals necessary to prepare the dead for burial were not exclusively limited to a male figure. The ferocious jackal god, Anubis, the god of mummification, had a lesser-known female counterpart, Anput, who was also portrayed as a wild black dog. The devotion of Isis to her beloved husband, Osiris, has made the story of their marriage legendary. Gods and goddesses had consorts, or partners of the opposite sex, who were not necessarily their mates. Feminine and masculine partnerships, whether or not they were husband-and-wife pairings, served to create balance in the pantheon. The Egyptian penchant for multiple possibilities was affirmed in the figure of the all-powerful masculine sun god, Ra. While Ra never lost his singular identity as sun god, he could fuse with another powerful male creator god, such as Atum, to create a composite figure, Ra-Atum. The sun god was also intimately connected to several feminine deities, including Hathor and Sakhmet, both of whom bore the awe-inspiring title of the Eye of Ra. In this tribute to the power of a feminine principle, the sun disk, visualized as an omnipresent eye, expressed a vengeful and destructive aspect of the sun god. Within this labyrinth of religious thought, the merger of the sun god with other powerful male gods affirmed creation and rebirth as a masculine principle.

Writing in his late nineties, the American poet Stanley Kunitz used the words “wild braid” to describe the creative impulse that bound his garden and his poems together. The metaphor and poem sprang from his discovery in autumn of the bodies of two intertwined snakes dangling from an old spruce tree. Egypt’s ancient gods, both female and male, were part of an equally wild metaphysical braid of intricately interwoven strands. As a species, we experience “the world” as being composed of two genders. It is the touchstone of our understanding. It is natural, perhaps inevitable, for us to look to one of the world’s great early civilizations for guidance in the arena of feminine and masculine dynamics.

. . . Thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, sacred images were living entities fully capable of divine participation and intervention in the day-to-day life of mortals.

Although we will never know the story that underlies the profusion of human hands prints found in the caves of our ancestors, we feel we are in the presence of a lost language.

A Hymn to Hands is a limited edition consisting of six books, two of which have a unique variation of a Cibachrome print titled The Blessing. The book opens with an Emily Dickinson poem, “I send Two Sunsets” and closes with her poem “Those dying then.” The Cibchrome prints and the written reflections by the artist-author and the Dickinson poems explore the human hand as an iconic symbol. The written reflection and print by the artist-author titled “Painted Prayer” is a reverie on the magnificent prints of the human hand made over thirty-thousand years ago that appear on the walls of Prehistoric caves. “The Journey” and “The Blessing” are personal remembrances that reflect upon the feminine capacity for compassion and protection. The Dickinson poems are haunting and elegiac reflections on the presence and limits of the power of the hand of God.

The embodiment of a solitary, passionate feminine voice, Emily Dickinson wrote enigmatic verses on small scraps of paper and envelopes until death silenced her poetic voice.

The design for A Hymn to Hands involved a collaboration among Donald Glaister, Suzanne Moore, Jacqueline Thurston, Greta Sibley, and Jessica Spring. The final design and typesetting are by Greta Sibley. A Hymn to Hands was letterpress printed at Horton Tank by Art Larson. The type is Requiem and was printed from photopolymer plates on Rives BFK paper. The bending was designed and made by Donald Glaister at Foolsgold Studio. Cibachrome, now a rare color photographic process, is a positive to positive photographic process using exceedingly pure and stable color dyes (cyan, magenta, and yellow) embedded in the paper’s archival emulsion. Cibachrome prints feel luminous, as if they are lit from within.

When the winter wind scatters our burnt ashes over a gentle sloping hillside, and orange poppies, the remnants of the dust of our dreams, rise from the rain-soaked earth announcing the onset of spring, may we remember with tenderness the hands that have lovingly repaired the tears in the fabric of our lives...