The Bi-Location Series

Wicklow Walk in the Feathers

Title: Wicklow Walk in the Feathers
original 9"x12" felt ink pen
on 60lb 98GSM acid free paper
June | 2020

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Wicklow Walk in the Feathers is part of The Bi-Location Series. Bi-Location is a collection of pieces expanding on the concept of locating. Locating is the practice of grounding yourself in the physical reality of the present moment. Bi-locating is a term I define as the process of grounding or locating while at the same time recognizing there is also an unconscious event in how you locate that is simmultaneaously happening and that this felt experience is connected with an as yet to be revealed sensorial experience of something that deep down is meaningful to you. By bi-locating you committ to exploring what that sensorial-based consciousness is and why you are connected in the present moment to what it is and most fascinating of all uncovering what it is that is relevant and meaningful to you in guiding your present circumstances.

The title of this piece surfaced after a deeper meditation about why I found myself stopping and focusing on a rock covered in moss and partially hidden with ferns and white flowers. It was a wet rainy day in North Seattle and thousands of miles away from Co. Wicklow, Ireland. Yet it was Wicklow running through me that wanted to connect with what my eyes were experiencing in Seattle. After more reflection I realized that what I was feeling was a deep and long standing relationship to Nature which was sacred to me and that interacting with that corner of the garden as I focused on it was to me a form of sacred renewal I had first created with Nature as a child already. That corner of the garden invoked in me a felt sense of connection back to the river stones, mossses and flowers that are part of the Wicklow landscape. There was in this bi-locating moment a communion within taking place - literally connecting both places through me and in me.

This communion moment is what I wanted to capture in the piece. The experience in Seattle is captured in the pine needled branches, the mushy green pea moss hues, and the watery blueness of the air that brought a cold freshness into my nostrils that renewed me in the same way my family's tradition did in the 1980s where we would often go for a Sunday outting to the Wicklow mountains, taking a walk together through a small patch of woods there.

The experience in winter at the time lifted the weight of the week otherwise filled with books, schooling, and the black soot of Dublin's bussling crowds and double decker diesel buses puffing out the helter skelter of city life. During the height of the pandemic lockdown the preoccupation of containment of the virus impacted how we experience our environments especially bringing attention to those aspects we took most for granted. Daily walks in the fresh air were suddenly the highlight of the living experience when the baseline was being confined inside to the four walls of a home for days, weeks, months, years. A walk in the neighborhood felt suddenly akin to the Sunday walk in Wicklow - a treat - a moment to feel grateful to be out and about. I noticed as I was creating the piece the white flowers in the artwork were quickly taking on a metaphoric lightness in their form which quickly transformed into the shape of feathers. These feathered-looking flowers, botantically speaking, do not actually exist except in the felt experience of lightness and freedom I was having at the time. I recognize now that I was opening up to what my deeper consciousness wanted to express as I walked through the rains and gardens of north Seattle in 2020 and the reinvigoration of freedom I felt while also rooting of myself in a continum of felt meaning and appreciation for the ever-renewing power of Nature.