Rituals of Compassion

In the West, we don’t really celebrate kindness and compassion - we do Remembrance but it’s centred in a basic acceptance of the inevitability and nobility of war. With VE celebrations tomorrow, I am dressing up my binational children in red, white and blue wondering where the black, red and gold sits among this messaging to the next generation of the virtues of warring.

I see drawing as a ritual of compassion; drawing a dead lavender is kind, through intense, generous observation we gift our greatest resources: kindness, time and attention. I have been developing ideas of Drawing Kin over the past two years and I feel this realisation is at the core of my practice. Rituals are good for us, this is what my reading has shown, extensive reading of ‘Mourning in the Anthropocene’ by Joshua Trey-Barnett for my RP and other books around strategies for expressing collective and personal grief show us that mourning and grieving rituals are central to processing loss and looking forward to more helpful compassionate transformation.

I find the enormity of climate change stifling, I know many do. I can manage my garden however, and I choose to see my garden as microcosm, a stand-in for the wider challenges and rituals of kindness as alternatives. By giving the dead lavender my focus, studying its intricate root patterns, its clever food storage systems, its logical organisation of branches to distribute light evenly, it’s elegant forms and wholeness, by intensely looking at the dead lavender it sort of speaks to a wider looking, a sort of looking with compassion, what I have previously written about as a deep bow. This loving, tending, empathetic looking changes the encounter, allows in a sense of bothness, increases my awareness of my own death and the lavender’s life as one collective thing. The illusion of separation exists here, the cycle is the same for us all.

Apropos cycles - these drawings seem to be circling back to the drawings I made for the interim show. I really like that. I like that these drawings have similar roots (pun intended) but because of the interconnectivity and repetition of pattern, the above ground trees are mirrored in the below ground root networks. The shift is subtle but decisive.