introducing the labyrinth...

labyrinth 1  - pastel and ink

labyrinth 2 - pastel, ink and wool

I have been preoccupied with labyrinth images this week.

The first image is the 'standard image' of a traditional labyrinth design, which I have recently been exploring (as a mindfulness exercise) in a variety of media, including clay and textiles, and which I created for this blog using oil pastels and overlaid with Chinese ink, to get a resist effect. I wanted the background to be black, to represent the internal experience of the labyrinth, but it came out as pale grey.

The second image is the same labyrinth, overlaid with a somewhat haphazard and multi-shaded wool yarn, which loosely tries to follow the path, but which has multiple sidetracks, loops and deviations. As it turns out, this yarn continues into the rest of the ball of wool, so it doesn't actually 'end'...

The first thing that stands out is the contrast between the first and second image. The first is orderly and has its own logical structure, the second is 'all over the place', but loosely follows the same path, or tries to.

The colours (white/red/black) were deliberately chosen. I used white (the path, the blank page, 'innocence', the beginning of life), red (the earth, the body, blood, the middle of life) and black (death, night, darkness, the internal experience), as they seem to link the image to many archetypal experiences. This sounds very deep and esoteric, but its not really.

The path or road goes from the outside to the inside and back again, so it represents the inward journey, and the return to external reality. The wool in the second image represents the busyness, and the meanderings of daily life, as well as the constant distractions provided by thoughts, feelings and the demands of work, life and other people, i.e. the opportunity to be pulled off task by a million other possibilities, which creates a constant tension and challenge, but I guess is also exciting... if it wasn't for this ability to be distracted, I wouldn't have been thinking about and making labyrinths in the first place, for example.

I feel I am usually in the second image, but am constantly striving to be in the first image. In other words, like the image last week, there is a wish for order and structure, which is unrealistic most of the time. Better to go with the flow...

*I also found a relevant quote, in relation to the spiral theme that was emerging in some of my images. Its from a novel called 'Disobedience' by Naomi Alderman, and I have written it out in full, in case it strikes a chord with anyone else as well as it did for me:

What is the shape of time?

On occasion we may feel that time is circular. The seasons approach and retreat, the same every year. Night follows day follows night follows day. The festivals arrive in their time, cycling one after the other. And each month, the womb and the moon together grow fat and fertile, then bleed away, and begin to grow once more. It may seem that time leads us on a circling path, returning us to where we began.

In other moods, we may view time as a straight and infinite line, dizzying in its endlessness. We travel from birth to death, from past to future, and each second which ticks by is gone forever. We talk of managing time, but time manages us, hurrying us along where we might have wished to linger. We can no more halt time than the moon can halt her nightly journey across the sky.

As is so often the case, these two seemingly irreconcilable observations combine to form the truth. Time is spiral.

Our journey through time may be compared to an ascent around the outside of a round tower. We travel, it is true, and can never return tot he places we have left. However, as each revolution brings us higher and further, it asl brings us round to encounter the same vistas we have seen before. ..

Well, its a bit long, but I think it says something about the spiral, and our relationship to time, which is important. As a child, I was so aware of the cycles of nature, and the rituals and changes of the seasons. This faded as I grew up, and life became more linear. I like the idea that the cycles are still there, because the spiral is a 3D structure that is both circular and linear at the same time.

more later.