Moonstone Mandala

Eucalypt Cafe and Gallery
January 20th to February 18th

Daily 8.30-4
Closed Tuesdays

6962 Arthur Highway. Port Arthur. Tasmania

Exhibition Opening

The exhibition was opened by Heather Rose author and Tasmanian business woman of the year. Below is the opening speech.

Firstly let me say, on behalf of Sally, welcome to all of you. I know Sally is delighted to see so many of you – having come today from across Tasmania and from the mainland, to be here in this very historic place for Sally’s first exhibition – the very first time she has publicly shared her artistic journey. And thank you to Jacqui and Richard at the Eucalyptus Gallery for this beautiful space to show Sally’s work. I know it means a great deal to Sally to have her first show here at Port Arthur.

Today I really want to celebrate Sally – being an artist alone in a studio is one thing but bringing that work into the public eye for all to see and judge is another. Sally I acknowledge your courage and your rigour as an artist. Sally’s work is extraordinarily accomplished, rich with not only the technical skill it takes to bring these paintings into being – but with a spiritual wisdom and an ability to tune herself in to frequencies not many of us choose to listen to – let alone harness for artistic purpose.

As I thought about Sally’s work a quote from a piece Sally wrote an interlude in Tibet with a beggar sprang to mind:

“And in that charged moment of asking, I gave away near everything, ashamed to walk away owning anything but hope.”

Sally gives entirely of herself in bringing these paintings to life - her soul is at the centre of her art.

I had friends look at Sally’s invitation and think instantly that these images were computer generated. Other people have thought that Sally scales them all up, like some sort of spirograph painting by numbers, and filling in the spaces with the appropriate colour. With nothing but a humble pencil, a bit of string, and (Peter tells me) not even a very good compass, Sally sets to work first locating the potential she wishes to convey - beginning always with a circle – sometimes large, sometimes small.

And then Sally goes on a journey with the painting - discovering its story, fleshing out its voice, finding the rhythms and nuances of its mood, harnessing the energy she finds within it to encourage it to grow and take form on the canvas.

I think of how as a novelist I also go on this journey, discovering characters and their stories, trusting in this process which is a little like cryptic orienteering, trusting that all the threads will come together at the end and the story – and the true nature of the story will reveal itself.

Like many writers, Sally has no sense of the end at the beginning. It is a mystical journey. And from this process which can take many months for one painting to be completed - Sally’s steady hand and fine brush work, infinite patience and fine layer of oil paint upon fine layer of oil paint - these eight paintings have emerged over the past two years. Their themes differ but they are all mandalas in one form or other - a sacred circle traditionally associated with healing and meditation.

Sally has said: “Mandalas, for me, are energetic mappings of the silent underlying rhythms of the cosmos inherent and mirrored in all things. The circle of a mandala is a sacred space where everything meets and anything can happen.”

Not being a painter, I am always in awe of those who can put paint to canvas or paper and speak of things that live within our human world – or things just beyond it. There is something of Sally’s work that makes me think of Salvador Dali – and some of the other surrealists – Miro, Max Ernst. Not because her work is surrealist – but because there is an alternate way of seeing at work in Sally’s paintings that is exciting and unique.

It would be easy to call it new age – but I don’t believe it is. I see that it taps into what Joseph Campbell would refer to as our ancient sense of symbolism. Our ancient understanding of things beyond our ability to grasp. And of course these paintings are also the product of Sally’s deep interest in Buddhism, Taosim and Chinese medicine.

I believe these paintings offer us a powerful opportunity to see some part of ourselves. When I stand in front of any of the masters, what I glimpse is a sense of the human condition. The artist doesn’t always intend this, it somehow tumbles out. Last year when viewing Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London I learned that Van Gogh had painted it to brighten the guest room for his friend Paul Gauguin who was coming to stay. And yet how that painting has touched so many lives. Sally’s paintings are not for the faint-hearted. They are for the adventurous, the seeker, the observer. They demand a level of interaction from the viewer. They can be unsettling, inspiring, eerie, unbalancing and balancing. They have enormous energy, and like the Sunflowers, like the work of any artist whose work is bold with passion and ideas, they speak to those who are ready to hear.

I asked my son Byron what he made of Sally’s work when we visited Sally and Peter at Windgrove some weeks back and he said this: “I think they’re so weird – like they’re not any particular shape but you can think a thousand things.”

I have no doubt there will be more and more shows – and that we will look back on this first show by Sally Horne as a rather remarkable privilege. I urge you to seize the opportunity to own one of these weird and wonderful, unique and powerful paintings – so that you can continue to listen to their unfolding stories – to see a thousand things.

Thank you

“All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, more eternal man [woman] dwelling in the darkness of the primordial night. There he [she] is still whole, and the whole is in him [her], indistinguishable from Nature.” -Carl Jung

Enlightened by a soft yet vivid light the radiance in this mandala is more like that of the deep winter sun or a moonlit night, burning cool and bright in a darkened sky.

Circular forms, smooth and silky, eddy and glide into the centre and back out; their swirling potential hint at something forthcoming. In the heart of the mandala an arctic fire glows so cold that it emits a hot radiance; there is a sort of transition here where the darkest hour begins to shift towards the light of daybreak.

Ghostly reflections of that which lie at the centre are mirrored at the edges. Something like a passageway lies behind each, seemingly leading back to the interior: a return journey to the source of origin.

Dream-like in its cool burning radiance, trance-like in its circulating circadian rhythm, something otherworldly haunts this image. Like the lingering reverberation of sound on water, this mandala is an echo of an alternate reality. There is a slipperiness that permeates this image, a silky intangible fluidity that whispers of something ungraspable, like the dark cool wilderness of predawn.

A sense of solitude saturates this mandala. Although dark, much like shadowy oceanic waters imbued with the florescent radiance of a coral reef, it is not dreary. The solitude here is one of rousing aloneness rather than a sinking melancholic loneliness.

We spend much of our time in the tamed conscious part of the mind -thinking, planning, analysing - whilst the untamed mind burns in the depths of the subconscious like an internal wilderness, alive, awake even in the darkest hour. What would happen if we were to dwell in the wilderness of the imagination and subconscious, unleashing them into our lives?
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There is a Secret One inside us;
the planets in all the galaxies
pass through his hands like beads.

That is a string of beads one should look at with luminous eyes.

-Kabir

Stars, diamonds, pentagons, triangles and rhomboids are some of the shapes that form this kaleidoscopic mandala. Together they create a pattern; a web of interconnection where each form is dependent upon and shaped by other forms. It is an interwoven whole, like a single piece of carefully folded origami paper.

Although not immediately evident, a precise tension holds this image together. If one individual component were to be carelessly shaped, the whole pattern would be altered. Perhaps, like a kaleidoscope, an entirely new design would emerge from this one shift, or perhaps the image would become a disjointed shambolic mess.

The mandala, despite its seeming stillness, appears to encapsulate a frozen moment in an unraveling sequence; a snapshot of a transitory shifting pattern where various forms are in the process of either opening or closing.

The mandala is like a prism where the original source of white light has split into a glorious spectrum of colour. A crystalline permeates the image, a self-radiating splendor where the source of light is not apparent and seems to glow from within.

Do we, the manifold forms of life in the cosmos split into our various forms, all stem from the one original source of light? Are we all one big piece of origami paper collectively shaped, shaping? Or are we part of a wonderful web of kaleidoscopic pattern shifting and ever changing? What a responsibility it is to be a part of a greater whole where our graceful, or disgraceful, actions influence the pattern of the entire cosmos.

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