Binda Colebrook
Emergent Work
Foregrounding
the
background
My art practice has shifted in the last two years. I recognize that a lot of work prior to the pandemic year of 2020 was grief work. It was stuck in a repetition compulsion of expressing and exploring suffering and hurt. It looked for what was going wrong. The slowing down that 2020 invited, led me, like so many others to read more, go out into the woods more, engage with nature more. What I found along the way was the power of connection to Self, and to our Earth. She is a sentient ecosystem, and she is the mother of us all. Indigenous peoples have always known it, and it is time to listen to their wisdom once more.
Sherri Mitchell, a member of the Penobscot Nation and an indigenous rights activist and lawyer, writes “Every living thing has its own creation song, its own language, and it’s own story. In order to live harmoniously with the rest of creation, we must be willing to listen to and respect all of the harmonies that are moving around us. The only way that we will be able to hear these harmonic vibrations is to become multi sensory beings.” *
This work invites the participant into sensations of inter-being connectedness. It awakens sensory play. It slows BEING down. It supports shifting lanes into the reciprocal WE space. When we are all in our centers, we will recognize that we are all engaged in a reciprocal dance with all living beings.This work hopes to open our sensory capacities so as to glimpse the metaphysical background.
* Sherri Mitchell Weh’na Ha’mu’ Kwasset – Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit Based Change p.6
GRIEF Work
We
are
those seeds
As noted above, my work has shifted in the last two years. As a result, I am intentionally shifting out of a documentation of despair, trauma and grief. That said, work that documents that state has its place. There is a lot that is not working on this planet because of human choices made, systems of oppression that have an intensely firm foothold in our psyches, and people with power who are not connected to the center within themselves. But it seems to me that it has to be accompanied with a more love centered and reciprocal intention. So this work is a spring board to engaging in what Rivera Sun calls the Dandelion Insurrection. Each dandelion seed is one in the whole. We are those seeds. We can be individual seeds of love that are always connected to all the other seeds that came from the whole.
earlier Work
The beginnings
of
coherence
The work in this section was made earlier in life. It explores notions of identity, home, the experience of having been raised female, communication and mis-communication. Much of it holds experiences of dislocation, trauma and isolation in its grip. Much of it no longer exists. This website serves both as a record of what remains, and a marker for the foundation from which later work emerged.
As Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen * says: “There is something in nature that forms patterns. We, as part of nature, also form patterns. The mind is like the wind, and the body like the sand: If you want to know how the wind is blowing, look at the sand”. This work is a visceral result of the wind and sand responding to the sources of the winds I experienced and metabolized.
* Founder of Body Mind Centering
“Dystopian” font from onlinewebfonts.com