Introduction

THE COSMIC RABBIT

The concept of the cosmic rabbit series springs from the Aztec concept of time as circular: life is followed by death and death is followed by life.

My intention is to express a graphic vision of circular time. I focus on a rabbit evolving through phases from birth to death, then voyaging through death back to life. The rabbit simultaneously represents its small self and the cosmos.

In 2006, Rene Arceo invited me to participate in a portfolio on nahuals. I decided to select an animal from the Codex Borgia 260-day ritual calendar. An animal belonging to the Aztec cosmogony would be the best choice.

I picked the rabbit. I took the head symbol, making very few modifications, and added a body, then engraved the image on lino. I also engraved dots around the rabbit that appeared to me as stars. I titled the work “Cosmic rabbit”.

Surprised by the enthusiastic response to this linocut, the idea came to make a series of rabbits. In the past, I had been told I should produce series of works. I now saw an opportunity to do so. I would create a series of rabbits, and if asked why so many rabbits, I would answer because the rabbit is so fertile.

The Codex Borgia not only gave me the rabbit, but also some clues on how to structure a long series of images where the combination of graphic elements developed a thought process.

A few words on the Codex Borgia. I had become familiar with this codex as a student. I bought a facsimile and spent hours dwelling on the graphics and reading the explanations in an attempt to understand the principles of pre-Columbian writing. I wanted to know how symbols can fit together to create meaning; how writing can be detached from phonetics; how pictures not only reveal a vision of the universe, but structure that vision, which was indeed the function of the 260-day ritual calendar.

Like the 260-day calendar, like any calendar in fact, the long rabbit series was to have a circular structure. The finishing point would be the starting point of a new cycle. My cosmic rabbit series would be dedicated to the life cycle of the rabbit. It would end with the beginning of a new rabbit life cycle.

And so I began to develop the cycle through combinations of graphics elements, like in the codex. I created my own cosmic vision using colour, form and graphic sequencing.

So, to start with, birth. We have the parent rabbits, the egg and the baby. The cosmos is dark blue, the stars are white. The new life form is pink, the colour of mammals when they are born. There are only 3 images in this first section, named ‘cosmic’, as reproduction is as succinct as it is important.

The next section is on the natural environment. The most interesting part of nature for a rabbit is anything green; greenery to hide in, greenery to eat. I could have named this series ‘grass’, but opted for ‘bush’ which I found more dynamic. Green would be combined with one other colour, its opposite: red. A warm, bright, optimistic red.

The next section is the inside the body. The colour is deep red in reference to blood. When a body is opened, despite the many organs, passages and cavities, what comes to view, what inundates our view is blood, flowing blood, the essence of life, and central to Aztec life-perpetuating rituals. Inside the body there is virtually no light, so the second colour is very dark grey.

The next section is dedicated to the principal object outside the body, space. Space can be two dimensional, three dimensional, four dimensional or more. It can be cosmic size or rabbit size. I chose black for the cosmic dimension. On the rabbit level, black combines with purple, blue and yellow. These colours symbolise day, night, sun and sky. This section finishes with the rabbit becoming decomposed in space. We have the four space colours; black, purple, blue and yellow, and also green, because rabbits are so partial to green.

The next section is on dreams. If we consider the time we spend dreaming in our sleep and day dreaming, too, it amounts to a huge portion of our lives. So, this section is long and anything goes. The rabbit form is modified. It becomes hyperbolic and quite extravagant. There are many colours in this series, going from straight black to the bright vivid colours of tropical fish. The three last images are more subtle in colour, as the dreams dissolve like clouds.

And finally, the dust section, or ‘death cycle’. It shows the rabbit after death as it disintegrates into dust and its body is recycled among the physical elements. The rabbit can be seen surrounded by giant particles; its body becomes the sand on a beach, or a volcano, or the moon, a rain cloud or simply a car. The colours are in keeping with the physical world. Indeed, the physical world has taken over and the rabbit is just a bunch of flying atoms...until something pulls together again, and a new microcosm forms, giving rise to a new cosmic rabbit cycle.