Prickly Pear Cactus: Goddess of the Coulées
[ See full work at LAIR Gallery ]
"Empress" [Photograph, Red Rock Coulée, AB, Canada] Darlene St. Georges.
Red Rock Coulée is a special place. Sacred. Protected. Scattered across these Badlands are
extraordinarily large boulders––concretions––where Pear Cactus burst in their sculpted cavities of ironstone.
Under marine skies
in moments of truth
we transcend
cracks and junctures
to discover
a mélange
"Perennial Goddess" [Photograph, Bull Trail Coulée, Lethbridge, AB, Canada]] Darlene St. Georges
Prickly Pear Cactus have deathly spikes, or thorns, which protect their fruit bodies from predators, provide shade, and retain water.
Symmetrical radial beauty
perched among grasses
enflamed
glowing
threading light
along Coulée edges
"Yellow Queen" [Photograph, Red Rock Coulée, AB, Canada]. Darlene St. Georges
Opuntia can be found from Southern Alberta to Argentina. Their sweet scented blooms have highly nutritious pollen––an oasis for Bees. Wild Opuntia are protected as an endangered species of wild fauna and flora.
Summer blooms
absorb luscious
rays
returning
Bees
glisten
Encounters
I believe that through aesthetic experience we encounter and experience dimensions of ourselves, which is multifaceted and emerge in the act of creating. There is a poetic and metaphorical dialectic that develops through the process of artistic creation, which I explored through the creation of "Encounters". As a multi-textural dialogue Encounters demonstrates how artistic expression encompasses the person creating it as much as it represents material space and place and, color symbolizes and embodies metaphysical understanding as much as it is an interpretive experience of the hues and forms in nature. Here color at once suggests a subtle silence as well as a powerful intensity, while the transition of forms, from presence to absence suggests a physicality of movement and sense of time. Through the process of creating my perceptions and experience, along with metaphysical phenomena are activated and embodied in my work. These experiences are transmitted through the plasticity of materials, the semantics and juxtaposition of colour, form, movement, texture and imagery and, in this work, sound – sound I created to articulate my sonic encounters and its role in transporting me 'within'; enabling me to explore and broaden my perceptions.
Sensations
Sensations is an artistic work that acts as a multi-textural dialogue and explores my memory sensations of my ancestors. As an artist, educator and emerging scholar my practice explores aesthetic experience through conceptual, sensory and the physical aspects of art-making. I understand that aesthetic experience is cultivated in complex and active spaces. Here a dialectic interplay occurs between what is visible, what is not visible and what is textual in the work, which is what I refer to as a “multi-textural dialogue” – a type of poetic and visual metaphorical dialogue that embodies meaning, knowledge, perception, intuition, and cultural and metaphysical phenomena that contextualizes human experience. Sensations is a dialectic engagement and can be viewed through an epistemological lens - as a way of knowing through an intricate artistic process of aesthetic awareness.
