Exhibition
Blue Landscapes
An unveiling of the Earth’s many-voiced landscapes through poetry and art
“Every landscape is a condition of the spirit”. Henri Frederic Amiel
This book and exhibition, Unveiling Many-Voiced Landscapes, is an ecological, phenomenological, and poetic exploration of the many voices in conversation between humans and animals, and between bodies and the earth. This dialogue encompasses every aspect of our sensuous surroundings—through our eyes, ears, skin, and nose, we form relationships with all living entities that capture our attention.
“To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.” – Carl Gustav Jung.
The paintings were created in concert with the poems, reflections, dreams, aphorisms, and meditative passages in the 2024 publication of my book, Breathing with the Earth, and in other books.
The exhibition and book revisit and critically examine the narrative of a world in crisis, using elemental blue paintings as instruments for transformation. Employing an alchemical methodology—utilising fire, wax, water, and salt—this work assembles imagery in varied shades of blue, striving to evoke the Origin or Ancient within a reimagined, integral future.
Playing with the Veil of the In-Between
Transitional blue landscapes: where life and death converge.
Salmon, as anadromous fish, hatch in freshwater, migrate to the ocean for several years, and return to their natal streams to spawn. Notably, Chinook salmon cease feeding upon entering freshwater, initiating the final phase of their lifecycle. Spring-run Chinook reach spawning grounds months before autumn, remaining nearly motionless in deep pools for extended periods. After spawning, both male and female salmon perish shortly thereafter.
Ecologist Derek Hitchcock describes dying salmon as occupying a liminal state — not fully alive or dead but playing with the veil between the two.
This book and exhibition explore and re-tell these liminal states through poetry and the blue paintings.
Poetry (and art) are mutational events in the history of consciousness, Jeremy Johnson.
Blue Prayer Flags or Love Letters
Om Mani Padme Hum – Compassion
Prayer flags bear the Ghachenchemon mantra script. The literal translation of this is ‘the highest umbrella’, which offers protection to its followers through enlightened prayer. The mantra invokes the wish that all sentient beings should have a rich life of achievement, free of fear, pain, misery, ignorance, illness, and failure.
Through reflecting on poetry and art, each painting in this collection became a Prayer Flag or a Love Letter, fluttering in the wind stirred by living psychic forces—archetypes, soul, the imaginal, and creativity.
The paintings serve as root metaphors for the manifold ways awareness comes into being. This collection, a manifestation of both poems and artwork, is offered like a begging bowl, inviting the collective to awaken to an inner longing for transformation that will open the future and the past in the present, filled with clarity, truth, wisdom and love.
Presence ripens things, as Rilke knew. It is in the present that the past and future are in attendance. Attention is the new Time. Cynthia Bourgeault
Each art piece functions as both a reflection and an invitation, exploring how art can embody the presence of the new Time. Through colour, form, and textured brushwork, the paintings encourage viewers to pause and perceive the symbiotic relationship between human experience and the natural world.
The creative process itself becomes a meditation, an act of breathing with the earth’s rhythms and honouring its quiet majesty.
Become the breath of the Universe
Everything is in a state of becoming.
Something is happening behind your life that is yours and not yours at the same time. Stanley Kunitz
Landscapes are visible poetry
I dream of a new world of poets, enlivening the life force in the present moment, where yesterday and tomorrow shimmer in the ‘Now '.
Landscapes are calling us to consciousness
According to Jung, “the longing for consciousness is a longing of the world itself: All Nature seeks this goal”.
Landscapes reveal themselves in the hidden grooves and majestic ridges of the immediate present… the now. They are not just a sight, but a symphony of colours, shapes, and textures - masterpieces of both nature and human ingenuity. With their rich history and vibrant presence, these landscapes are not just physical entities but emotional anchors, profoundly connecting us to our past and inspiring our future. They are not just there; they are a part of us, stirring our emotions and awakening our senses.
Oh, heaven above me, you pure and deep thing! You abyss of light! Looking at you, I shudder with divine desire. To throw myself into your height – that is my depth! To hide myself in your purity – that is my innocence! Together, we learned everything: to climb up to ourselves and beyond, and to smile cloudlessly. Nietzsche
Landscapes are living testaments to our pasts
“If you truly understand that the foundation of your mind is directly connected to the foundation of the universe, you will be able to truly hear, see, and evaluate everything throughout all visible and invisible realms”. Daehaeng Sunin
Each landscape is its place, like a great blueprint holding multiple emerging traces of who and what we are becoming.
Landscapes are resonant echoes of our present
Silence shines into us. Emptiness shines into us, where there is no becoming, just choiceless awareness.
“The awakened mind removes the veils of illusion and grants a view into the intricate depths of the universe. The sun, moon, and stars blend in a beautiful melody — a concrete experience of the Azure's continually present, recurring, and self-renewing process, the luminescing light of raised consciousness.”
The Sky Cracked
Invisible landscapes rise and fall in Consciousness, the Earth.
We are inside this Consciousness.
“The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness”.
Paul Cezanne
The only way to travel to the future in the present is to live on the edge or horizon of processes—the liminal spaces where human and non-human meet, like human and Nature, human and animal, human and the more-than-human, mind and earth, the soles of your feet and the soil.
It is a deliberate venture to elicit the space between exploring and elucidating the physics and ontology of the vibrational or quivering breath, delicately textured with mystery, movements, memory, and musings.
The Bouncing Light of the Bare Tree – Tree landscapes
“Any landscape is a condition of the spirit”.
Henri Frederic Amiel
The bouncing jewelled light of a bare tree in an almost translucent landscape is like a living script of ensoulment. It fills me with an uncanny rapture of recognising moments when infinity overlays everyday consciousness.
“Describing the beauty of a tree is akin to planting word–seeds in the soil of consciousness, which grow into poems. When these poems mention the tree’s bare branches, they stimulate our senses and slowly evoke subtle messages about our world.”
Her Body-Scape is a Forest of Trees
From a topological point of view, our own body could be considered a landscape with mounds, valleys, caves, and holes. So, it seems evident that our body is a figuration of Mother Earth. Louise Bourgeois
Her body is a forest where everything grows …
The trees glow even as dusk gets dimmer
Her track is slender, her eyes torches
Holding its divine … fearless glimmer
Are we all branches of the same tree, or are we the quiet ache of a dark and lonely forest that can sense the importance of light, the sun illuminating the shadows in the underbrush and canopy of the trees?
The Silver — A Future Landscape
My life is a silvery tinkle in the eternal rotation of the Great Prayer Wheel of pure intention.
1
We shall live among the new fullness
And the wealth of an inner glow
Strange skies, distracted trees
Unforeseen colours in the blue from below
It is infinitely early mornings old -
Now transparent in an unobstructed whole
Shimmering an orange-blue-silver display
We shall live into and through a new way
11
We shall live among
New paintings in the sky
And trees strangely high
Sheer presence in the Silver
The lustrous transition of you and me
A Landscape of the Otherworld
Looking at the starry sky, I tremble with anticipation
Of tomorrow, looking at me
Poetry and art channel fierceness
as a force of beauty, vitality and meaning.
The creative fire transforms
the human shadow and suffering
into something incandescent,
something supreme –
Landscape of Creative Fire Igniting the Between
“[It is about] feeling the polyrhythmic pulse of this place [the earth] – this huge windswept body of water and stone, this vexed being in whose flesh we’re entangled”. David Abraham
Mother Earth dances around the Fire of Perpetual Change, inviting the Tolkienesque Imaginings, fantastical creatures, and worlds reminiscent of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works to weave new tales of worlds that glisten with the reality of her being. She waits for dawn and invites the solid, stony, middle-earthen creatures to write the Memoirs of the future, a collection of stories and experiences yet to come, in the first innocent light of the sun, etching the surfaces of ancient stones with possibilities. She is the Alchemy of constant change.
A Landscape of Liminality, the In-Between IV
I envision and dream about ‘space and time mutations to becoming an Interbeing’ as the new polyphonic movement of the depth and praxis of blue water as waves (consciousness) and profound secret blue presences of the collective unconscious tucked away in hidden caves at the bottom of the sea of the cosmos. I hear the melody, the music, the magnificent symphonies of intertwining stars, sunlight and sages playing in the mists of pregnant possibilities.
A Landscape of Liminality, the In-Between III
Knowing yourself beyond knowing happens in a relationship. Moving beyond what you know in your explorations of life’s relentless suffering is difficult without such a relationship. This interface, or relationship, between humans, humans and earth, and humans and non-humans is a landscape, an in-between Hermetic space, characterised by a novel quality of love, “agape,” an unconditional, translucent connection where yesterday and tomorrow thrive in the now.
The sage hovers in these landscapes of liminality, the In-between.
The wisdom of the sage is the air that rushes through the wings of poetic intuition as it bears itself to a great vantage point to observe the play of shadow and light dancing on earth.
A Landscape of Liminality, the In-Between VII
The Pregnant Monsoon
“I and my thoughts are immersed in the echoes of political, ideological and cultural fragmentation and worldview incoherence”.
I float in the back
of the beyond of the universe
bathing in the smell of the bruised moon
the crimson waters of the pregnant monsoon
swelling swelling
As I breathe in the fragrant hues around me, I can’t help but feel that whatever happens to the Pregnant Monsoon is a gentle occurrence. It quietly listens to the melodies of half-drowned souls, which contain both anguish and ecstasy, rippling within the mirror of the beloved bruised moon—our Mother’s body—which is feeling itself.
A Landscape of Liminality, the In-Between VIII
God, take me to that place where I may speak without words. Rumi
I feel the emergence of the Rubedo, the Red Wildflower Princess, in the universal cauldron of swirling prima materia. She is the earth, the vulva, the volcano, unfurling in the way of wandering words, the sparkling occurrence of wildflowers amid the collective unconscious obscuration of body, mind, soul, and spirit—the chain of being quivering! She is the emerging Self.
A Landscape of Liminality XV
She has been touched…
She has been touched
by the breath of eternity
swirling in soundless colours
the blushes of boundlessness
the poetry of perpetuity
She has been touched
by the diaphanous hand of death
illuminating the imaginal between
the deep blue, the cheeky green
the scrawl, the scribble of the fall
She has been touched
by the budding blueness of being
the emerging formlessness, seeing
the slender silence of mortality
the gracious quivering of reality
A Landscape of Liminality XVI
Redreaming the world
The poet turns the Earth
Into a turquoise butterfly
Giving us shelter
The poet spins the sun
Into the raging deity
Of unreason, the unravelling
The poet knows the scent of dreams –
Gathered in silver purple beams
Slipping quietly into our lives forever
The Landscape of Blue Soil – The Future
For the soul, conformity is death.
The soil of the Earth laughs recklessly in shades of blue, flings about carelessly, repeats itself endlessly, and dreams about secret moments in its exploration of all possibilities and the imaginal beyond the restraints of the collective.
This landscape of blue soil in a Uroboros represents the future unfolding of survival on a cracked mandala planet—blue Uroboros showing up in the Now as a landscape of potential awakening and birth.
Landscape of Mothers III
She, the Wild Woman, the Anima, is an aspect of Nature—a place where things grow, incubate, and die—a living thing. She is the soul, rising above the din of mainstream thinking and expectation. The Earth, or the Wild Woman, speaks and sings through the development of awareness and acceptance of herself, transforming her body and mind into poems.
She waits for dawn and invites the solid, stony, middle-earthen creatures to write the Memoirs of the future in the first innocent light of the sun, etching the surfaces of ancient stones with possibilities. She is the Alchemy of constant change.
A Landscape where Music is the Mother of Presence I
We become friends with the immediate things in our lives – like music, the creative fire in art and poetry and the radiant manifestations of Earth’s breathing, loving, pulsating Beauty.
I hear the melody of love,
the sonnet of Shakespeare’s Flying Fighting Dove
and the slow death march of creatures, places,
and words in A Minor Baroque.
So, let us sing about the wild world
that is the ambiguity of us,
and develop a sound
that penetrates all barriers and lies –
the paradoxical echo of the original voice that never dies.
A Landscape where Music is the Mother of Presence II
Her patterns, tones and textures
glisten in the shade of the world’s shadows.
Her silver spider webs vibrate gently like strings of small diamonds in a simulacrum of a starry night –
The galaxy is rendered in 'Emerging Secrets' and 'Silver Sutras'.
I hear her voice burbling like a river as she murmurs the song of water—the Grace of genuine kindness and generosity—as she sits in the crucible of the Earth, churning matter, body, soul, spirit—the emergent and disappearing alchemy of the breathing universe.
She is the mother of our emotions, the origin of living Grace.
A Landscape of the eternal song of sweet stillness
The only thing you can bestow upon yourself is to be careful about what you allow yourself to do in a broken world. Each step you take will determine the outcome of your soul's destiny. Will you lose hope or transform into a translucent, truthful living landscape where Grace is the Self?
.... Honouring Nature
We are the sweet stillness of the eternal song. It is in this stillness that we are made. It is in this sweet stillness that we disappear.
I cried when Mother whispered in my ear,
“Feel the writing in the sky,
the sensuous show of how to die,
the elegance of transition on the horizon,
the sweet stillness of the eternal song,
when all the colours of existence,
The golden hues are gone.”
A Cosmic Blink — Is the moon eating the sun
Is the moon eating the sun
“We are very rare configurations of atoms.”
“We are the only island of meaning in the Galaxy.”
“We are it in the galaxy. This is it.”
(Brian Cox)
We live in this tiny window of immortality
which has been ruled out by the laws of nature -
dappling in intelligence, maths, music, and meaning
leaving the most petite signature of our brief existence
written across the sky of our galaxy, where it bends and curves
Landscapes are visible poetry
Looking at the ‘Path’, I call you — are you there? The dusty path of life has led me back to you. In my wanderings, I found the dust of many deaths and losses, rearranged into whimsical cloud formations, flirting cheekily with the gilded sunrays racing toward the underworld—the rivers of collective dreams. I know my soul rests there and plays the eternal game of change — impermanence.