Aurum

        I have been asked about the image (and name) on my blog.  It's from my Masters of Fine Art final project. I was painting and studying female iconography and got very interested in the gold halos in religious paintings and also in Bizantine icons.  I had previously created some work around the Madonna /Whore dichotomy which led to painting halos on ordinary women (the idealization of the feminine). This then led to looking at gold as a subject in itself, and someone along the way told me that Aurum was gold in Latin.  Aurum/aura...there I was painting auras(halos!!).  In the Periodic Table  the symbol for gold/aurum is a circle with a dot at the center. In Astrology that is the symbol for the sun.  The sun in Astrology represents the Self.

     Meanwhile I has started reading about Alchemy (as part of the iconography around gold). According to Carl Jung, in Alchemy, the transformation from base metal to Gold is a metaphor for the transformation of the Self. So....long story short...I decided to create an installation about Gold.  I wanted to have gold dust either falling or sprinkled on the floor in a pattern...or cover walls with it etc ( this is art school...!!) though for obvious reasons using bronze dust...but it turns out is toxic.  So I decided to film it falling...

     Around the same time I was listening to a talk by someone named  Prem Rawat (see Words of Peace Global on side bar) and he was speaking about how we are  rich in life in a way we don't understand...and we don't realize it.  He said it is like gold is falling/ raining all around us (and in us) and yet we think we are poor. And yet all we have to do is put out our hands to catch it.  He said  thats what consciousness is .... putting out our cupped hands.

Catching the gold.

Comments

  1. There are "gold" powdered pigments made out of mica, which is basically nontoxic.

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  2. Thank you. I will search that out for future installations.

    ReplyDelete

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