Perhaps All Art Is Ritual by Jackie Morris

To mark the publication of her new collection of essays, Nemesis, My Friend, Jay Griffiths invited a group of writers and artists to respond to some of the themes in the book. Here Jackie Morris writes about how ritual and art are intertwined.

 

 

Perhaps all art is ritual?

 

Did it begin with Daedelus? An engineer who made a maze to hide a monster. A labyrinth; meditative pathway, shaped like a finger’s print.

 

Perhaps it is older still, as marks carved on stones, drawn on walls, a mosaic worked into a into spiritual space.

 

For me it began over a decade ago, playing with gold leaf on beach pebbles to see what would happen. Gold on stone. A mark in time. Even stone erodes and changes. All change is constant.

 

 

The first part of the ritual is to find a stone, water-worn, sea-smoothed. It takes time, by seashore or river. Each stone is unique.

Listening to the water-song, birds, wind-shift, wave-lift and fall.

Brush the surface with fingertips and feel how smooth, porous. Feel the weather on the stone’s face.

In winter, frost rimes each stone.

In summer, they hold sun’s heat.

Wet, each stone shines with a different beauty.

Water sings colour to the surface.

 

 

Home then, and in the spaces between painting, writing, to calm and steady the head, using a brush made from the pin feather of a woodcock, a calligrapher’s tool, first draw the seed of the labyrinth. Then join, link, curve, touch, shape with sizing, as the mind settles into the pattern, and a calm focus.

Is this ritual?

 

Choose the gold, sometimes loose leaf, sometimes a sheet of transfer leaf that will hold the soul-pattern of the labyrinth, as the gold moves to where the sizing lies, using a burnisher shaped like a dog’s tooth, made from agate, and the stone is done.

 

 

Another walk, to another beach, stream, lake.

Often to a place where time and tide carve stone bowls and hollows into rock. Here to place the gilded stone, on a ledge, shelf, runnel or rock pool, for a small window of time, until the sea returns. And perhaps it might catch a curious eye before waves claim the gift?

Sometimes to a place where the sweet, fresh water runs towards the salt, resting in water while shive-light adds new patterns to stone and gold.

Light, water, time, stone, gold, moon, hand, mind, working together.

 

 

Sometimes far from the sea, snagged into a cleft in a tree, left at the base of the roots, in hollows of fence posts, on hill tops and crags, in rivers and lakes.

Once in a hawthorn tree, wedged into a branch like a witch’s mark, where hills slope down to lakes, where dippers sing.

Once given to a friend, climber, who took the stone to a hill top, where within minutes, the stone was scoured clean of all trace of gold by the ice wind.

 

 

Once on the grave of a friend, high above the sea, looking towards home.

Once, into the grave of a friend, a woman with a voice like a bird, and it was a long drop into that dark resting place.

Is this giving back of the stones ritual; back to the land, to the sea, to the living, to the dead?

 

Now and again the place of leaving is noted, that moment recorded, the co-ordinates typed, like mathematical poetry onto the tissue remnant, gold sheet of the stone’s soul. United, for a while, pinned to an ever moving map. Time, captured in keys of a typewriter.

Is that ritual?

 

Each act of creativity becomes a form of prayer, if the heart is centred in the making.

Perhaps all art is ritual.

 

***

 

Jackie Morris is an author and artist. She lives in Wales by the sea. Her latest book is Feather, Leaf, Bark & Stone. 

All images in this piece are the work of Jackie.

 

Jay Griffiths’ new book is Nemesis, My Friend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Share your thoughts

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.