Creative Inheritance

Welcome to Week Three of the month-long Carnival of Creative Mothers to celebrate the launch of The Rainbow Way: Cultivating Creativity in the Midst of Motherhood
by Lucy H. Pearce. 

Today's topic is Creative Inheritance. 

The  home where I grew up as a child was like a vibrant, living alter. My mother, Jan Pierce, makes an art of everything. Ordinary life always becomes filled with a great, tender and fulsome beauty wherever my mother’s hand has had a say. A deep holistic integrity of material and aesthetic resounds in her, a fierce warriors heart to protect our Earth and the small creatures that dwell upon Her back, a passion for all things made with the hand from the tools of nature.

It seems as though thinking back with the eyes of my child self, that there were always candles lit in our house, that soft, warm, reverent light emanating from black burnished angel candlesticks from Mexico, full skirted and winged. The house was always full of great billowing bunches of blooms, gathered from the beautiful native garden mum always has growing or from the road-side edge, their glorious filaments of colour and texture consuming the table, music always floating on the ether and food flowing like a love song always, abundant and beautiful. Copper pots of dying fabric scattered around the house like cauldrons, the smell of wax being ironed from batik, the smells and sounds and the feeling of knitting yarn, sewing cloth, embroidering, singing, cooking, painting….dancing, mum has always loved to dance.

The walls of our home hung with my mum’s beautiful paintings, visions of children and wildflowers, figures and animals, trees brimming with birds, moths, butterflies, fungi, moss, birds and more birds. I used to love watching Mum paint, the poise of her mouth, ripe with the expectation of her creation, her body a symphony of focus, beneath the halo of her lamp, her paint box a treasure trove of mystery.

As children mum would take my 3 brothers and I walking in the bush and draw our eyes always to the small plants emerging from the Earth, the native orchids and lilies in the spring and summer, the fungi and moss in the winter months, teaching us to see and to know, the detailed and the miraculous. Awakening the artist's eye in me, teaching me the face of the divine as it manifested on our little patch of ground.

Of all the qualities my Mother carries with her in this life, it is this capacity to create beauty, and to make life artful, to see always through the poetic lens of the creative soul, that I cherish most in her.

 In 2009 the Black Saturday Bushfires came and we lost my beautiful father to that furious firestorm. Mum also lost her home where they had lived, and with it so many amazing paintings and creations, photos and beloved treasures. All the pictures and ceramics shown here are pieces created since the fire, a testament to her tenacity and healing. The home where she now lives is again filled with art, the walls in the kitchen are painted with a beautiful mural and on the bathroom wall these words are painted.

Set aside the learned ways of perceiving the world as dead matter for your use and see if you can recover again your actual perception of the world as a community of beings to whom you are meaningfully related. Erazim Kohak

.....our dreams are pale memories of themselves,
and nagging doubt the false measure of our days.
Even so the spirit voices are singing,
their thoughts are dancing on the dirty air 
their feet touch the cement, the asphalt,
delighting still, they weave dreams upon our 
shadowed skulls.
If we could listen, if we could hear.
Let's go then. Let's find them. Let's listen for the water,
the careful gleaming drops that glisten on the leaves, the flowers.
Lets ride the midnight, the early dawn,
feel the wind striding through our hair.
Let's dance the dance of feathers, the dance of birds.....
the dance of paws and fins, of wildflowers, 
grasses and little wings, 
the dance of the Earthly Child.

Part of the mural on Mum's kitchen wall                    

Jan Pierce

 

My beautiful Mum and sleeping son