Artist Statement

February 3, 2014

Where it Began And how we got here, possibly how you got here, too.

In small amounts the entire story unfolds.

As in all good stories, we thought we were real, so we figure you thought you were too.

It turns out, none of us are real, not in a reasonable way. We are partially real and mostly made up.

Here is our story and why we create what we do.

There was a moment.

We can remember when we weren’t, before we were.

There is an understanding that the universe is huge, miles and miles of huge beyond number, and yet we 1

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found ourselves close enough to reach out and touch one another.

We had been asleep for hours in this endless space of time before we realized that inside a story is the center of a seed, a seed waiting for water and light and earth.

So earth is where we landed. We are not from here, even though we look normal enough, wearing the clothes, speaking the words, flowing with the flow of culture for the most part.

We speak to angels and they speak to us. We count them as our very best of friends, and they love us dearly. There is a great comfort in that, especially with the story we’re about to tell you.

Imagine being yourself, just you being you, minding your own business, flowing along like regular folks, and suddenly your day turns to something entirely different than what you thought a day should be.

Days can become most anything they want to be, if you allow them the room to breathe in a new story.

Apparently that is what the both of us did, and from all intent purposes, we seem to have done it at exactly the same moment. Does that make sense, that someone you’ve never met could do, or say, or think almost the same kind of thought and be in a day different than the way it started?

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February 3, 2014

Angelic happenstance is what that’s called. Fate, destiny, kismet are similar words to convey the changes that took place in our lives.

Lives change, stories change, things become different. It’s only natural, but it takes awhile to get used to change, particularly when it feels as though your life is a book and one book ended and another began. That’s what happened.

You don’t just one day say, “hey angels how are you doing?”, if you don’t usually speak to angels. For us, we came upon it over time, years of time, until we became as comfortable talking to angels as we are talking to you. Not that that’s always been easy.

So how does someone get from not seeing, hearing, or believing very much in angels, to having full conversations with them?

When we first came together, we both were trying to reach into a new space in our lives. I remember praying to find the other part of myself, and this is from someone who just did not pray. Well there was the time when I was 18 and felt a sudden need to pray when I was away from home at school. I prayed in ernest. I heard myself pray out loud, heard the words I was saying into the space of the room I was saying it in, and I started laughing. It was a grand good laugh, one that lasted, because I can still feel that laugh today, 50 years later. I was laughing because it occurred to me that I was talking to myself, I was hearing myself, and I was listening to 3

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myself. It had a huge impact on me. It settled me down, it comforted me. I had something to say, and I was willing to listen to myself.

When you’re inside a story, these sorts of things can creep up on you, a bit of an awareness insight, a nudge in the direction of your own direction.

We are Angel People.

That’s what best describes us, if description is what you need, though people are bound to call it many other things.

We knew pretty much right away that our relationship was not an ordinary one, circumstance threw caution to the wind, and we went from barely knowing one another, to being with each other day and night, night and day.

What came out of this intensity is a life worth being in, an alive life, one that gets written every day, changes all the time, and is the most adventurous, awe-inspiring piece of work we’ve ever imagined.

And Fairie People.

We started out small, I mean our forward direction together advanced through our creativity. We allowed it to unfold organically, which meant, at the time, we were driven and anxious, elated and scared…. we hadn’t yet learned to put the “a” before the “c” to make scared, sacred. But we were learning.

Like a freight train we were learning. Up all hours 4

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of the day and night, listening, putting ideas and patterns together. Our brains on overload and excited to be so alive.

And Creative People.

We felt all of creation had opened its doors to us, and it had. We could hear and smell and taste, as never before. Everything meant everything, like a writer at the keyboard, all the potential there in front of us. Letters and words coming together fast as lightning, ideas bounding in from space and time.

Images appearing and allowing themselves to be drawn, as though being traced onto paper in front of our eyes. Miracle after creative miracle opened to us in our desire to feel more, to know more, to dream more than ever before. We were wide open and undaunted by the task before us.

Art and Pattern.

We asked ourselves, What are we doing?? How do we manage all this energy? Where is this taking us?

Are we willing to completely let go and allow our lives to become this newness that is unfolding? Can we become something other than what we thought we were being?

Yes, was the answer to all of it, and how we would manage would just come to us, as we had to each other. we were being taken to fairyland, fey re-land, a place that looks like where you just were, only now everything seems to be completely dierent.

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We re-landed on the planet, felt completely at home inside of ourselves, and felt as though we where far from where we had started.

That’s where the art came in, a link, a visual passage from where we had travelled within ourselves, to the outside world.

Travel.

We travelled for years and years in the landscape, mapping our way, bringing back patterns unlimited in scope and beyond reason. We painted and wrote, drew and sewed, photographed, sculpted, filmed, and recorded the journey of all that we saw, all that we felt, all that we were given to understand.

Every day we created, every night we were busy in our dreams, until day and night fused into one long walking meditation of life. We became awake all the time. We became aware all the time of everything around us. Distance ceased to matter, space folded as time stood for something completely dierent to us than it had been when we first met.

Everything expanded, time slowed down, space grew, we found ourselves completely able to learn our creative rhythm and breathe it in. In so deep that all of life changed around us.

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February 3, 2014

Imprintsial Patterns.

Patterns came to us, like birds to a feeder, such colors! Such beauty! We were in awe of what was coming out of us, we were no longer the persons we had been, we were something completely new to ourselves. We had to introduce ourselves to each other all the time, we fell in love with each other every day, all over again. Bliss. Happiness. Joy. The patterns started unfolding and it was all we could do to keep up. As we created them, we heard what they were, what they were about, and who they were for.

They were for the both of us, you and us, they were healing patterns, they were imprintsial patterns that the eye could imprint, the body assimilate with ease, and the soul would then apply when appropriate and needed, through the desire of each individual, based on their own highest good.

We were amazed, we were focused, and we were willing to convey a gift of in-sight to an outer world.

There were hundreds upon hundreds of patterns to be drawn and painted, we were to do them together, at the same time, on the same piece. We were to let go of our hands and allow what was to become present to become present to us.

We start out with 4�x 6� unlined index cards, using brush paint pens. The two of us bent over these tiny rectangles of paper, each drawing at the same time, crossing over each other’s lines, marks, and patterns.

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Bumping foreheads and hands, as we drew in such a small space. Painting patterns between the hands and fingers of the both of us. We watched and participated in the same moments, and were amazed, as though we were looking at a new artist’s work for the first time. We were that new artist, and we knew then that we had given up our individual self to a greater being, and were able then to call ourselves, for the artistry we had become, Clarity.

Becoming Yourself.

You mostly become yourself when you let go of being who you are. Does that make sense? You give away yourself, when you are able to listen to another, and you get yourself back when you speak from what you’ve become by doing so.

The art we create, we create by letting go of being artists, instead we listen to the sounds of the paint, the sounds of the canvas, wood, and paper, and they speak to us in the language of angels and the fey.

The only way you can come to this space is to let go of Reason and become unreasonable. It is unreasonable to listen to something invisible, it is unreasonable to look to something you cannot see with the physical eyes, it is unreasonable to taste something that is said to have no substance.

We came to a space that intersects the inner and outer worlds and we found that we could travel between the worlds. By doing so we were able to 8

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connect and animate all thought. Thought that creates through an understanding that everything is alive, if you are willing to listen to it.

We are not Taught.

We are not taught to listen to our pencil, or our chair, or for that matter, to our house. More’s the pity. Had we been taught these things, we would be a long way toward an understanding of how the angels speak to us.

Humming is a good way to start yourself in the direction of hearing. Children hum, people who are happy hum, humming is a natural occurrence when harmony is present. Sometimes it’s out loud, sometimes its interior and just to your inner self, sometimes it busts out and everybody and their brother or sister hears it. What a wonder humming is.

We are not taught to hum in school, or at the table, or at work. It is considered a disruption, rude, or inattentive. Angels hum.

Bees hum, or buzz, hummingbirds hum, and angels hum. All pollinators. Each one bringing to another and another and another, the vibration of life, fairying from one place to the next, one person to the next, the life-force of connection.

We sometimes hum when we are painting, keeping company with ourselves, connecting our sounds to the color, the movement, the shape, the feeling.

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February 3, 2014

Weaving the senses into the work. Art is not just what you see, it is what you feel on the inside.

All of our Art. All of our art is infused with the joy we feel, from the gift we have been given since that first day, eons ago, when we let go of being, and just became.

We became the art, the paint, the colors, the canvas, wood, and paper. We became the patterns, we became the healing, we became people who could hear the angels humming in our ears, our minds, our hearts, and each other.

We know the angels are real, and that the fey world of fairie is real, and that plants have feelings, as do the rocks and trees. There is an art in letting go and listening beyond what the world says.

We came to our art organically, we let it show us the way, it strengthened our willingness to listen deeper still, and it gave us a life to share. We share it with each other, always, and we share with those who are willing to listen to the inside of things.

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February 3, 2014

We are Here.

We are here from another place, that is so obvious to us, and we remain here to be visible in the sharing of angelic awareness.

This story of angels goes way back and comes way forward, past where you are, or where you might go, and it carries itself far beyond the reach of this world account of reason. Yet the inner world is the most reasonable place you will ever know.

We are inside the inside and outside of the outside.

We are between everything, and everything is between us. And between us, we’re betting on the inside of you. From here to there is a very short distance, given the dierence between time and space, up and down, left and right. They are all in the same room if you turn the light on, and the only way you can reach the light switch is to enter inside the room.

We are here to help. To paint. To hum.

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February 3, 2014

The Studio.

Now there’s a kettle of fish. If you know anything about studios, you know they can have a mind of their own. We have been in our present studio for four years. It is getting smaller and smaller, through no fault of our own, It is getting smaller because more and more items are showing up. It’s true that we bring them home with us, it’s just as true that once here they don’t want to leave.

A studio is not just a space, it is a presence, and you’ll only ever know that if you listen. Some studios never want anything in them, but all the studios we’ve ever had are of a very generous nature and seem to want the entire world to stop in.

Which is why we find ourselves scrunched up a bit, to make way for the parade of puppets, toys, artifacts, feathers, nests, string, paints, easels, frames, and canvas, and books, books, books!

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February 3, 2014

How Does an Angel?

How does an angel know itself? From the inside out.

They are all aflutter, as it were, with the entirety of life, and they see in life, and the beyond of it, a presence that is forever unfolding.

And how you talk to an angel, is to first practice talking to yourself, which we all do to varying degrees, but to talk to a angel, you must desire more than you currently know.

That’s how the both of us came into it.

Relationship.

How does a relationship grow? What makes it unfold? How does it know where it’s going? These are the questions that our creativity gave us. The invisible world holds all the answers, because those answers are the gifts that provide questions.

Our relationship to our studio, to ourselves, to the invisible world with the muse, amusement, even muse-see-ums, all part and parcel to the adventure we’re all on.

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February 3, 2014

How Does a Fairy? and Art. How does a fairy know to show up? When you feel so small as to practically disappear. That’s how we felt as we went along, at times. Many days were filled with creative fire and movement, other days are filled with stillness and a quiet that expanded space.

It was in this space that all the art flowed in, unfolding its smallness into something large enough to actually see. Grounded, landed, at home.

Then Gaia, too.

So it begins at the beginning, and even sometimes before that. It never really ends, this being before you are, this being, and this becoming.

We found ourselves connected in our expression, our creativity, and our love. We are part of, as are you, this wonderfully creative planet, and we are connected through the love of expressing its humming beneath our feet. An endless hum of resonating the visible and invisible at the same moment in a galaxy of time and space.

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So We are Here, As are You. We are as real as real, and as magical as the invisible threads that weave throughout our fibers.

We are threaded and woven into a cloth of creative expression and in this we share a vision of art and pattern designed to nurture us all.

Clarity Visit us at:

www.situlacodex.com 15

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