ORACULAR POEM SIGILS - VADEMECUM - ESTUAIRES/ESTUARIES
+ A BOOK OF HOURS FOR THE CTHULUCENE
Livres d’heures—like the famous Les Très Riches Heures de Duc de Berry—were medieval Books of Hours (an ‘hour’ in the Middle Ages being defined as an inexact space of time allotted either to religious or business duties). They functioned both as works of art and personal tools, assisting their owners in monotheistic spiritual devotion with cycles of prayers, images, and readings tailored to the hour and season. Inspired by historical forms, Falkner invites the hand of chance into the mix and works with poems, short texts, and game and divination methods to produce contemplative image-objects. The book was the original portable device, and here the book form is used as a deliberately slow media format both to complement and replace ubiquitous tiny digital devices the way urban planners deploy obstacular infrastructures for traffic calming, or durational performance art challenges both artist and audience to elongate attention from its habitual mode, in order to experience a rupture from everyday overculture reality,
oracular poem sigils, 2022-
each page combines numerous oracular techniques and sacred geometry to provide its beholder with multivalent modes of visual contemplation and energetic activation upon a temporally-pertinent text—as one finds in a Book of Hours, grimoire, or yantra thangka. Divination is a ritual dance where we can invite the ancestors and personal Unseen partners to grab hold of the hand of chance and lead us all from the diviner's language-based prompts into other realms of being and sensing, where we can retrieve advice and assistance in transformation and manifestation.
VADEMECUM, 2022-
The vade-mecum or vademecum has come to be a term used in both English and français for a book (or increasingly, other objects and devices: including the smartphone) indispensable and to be frequently consulted, and especially that fits in a pocket on one's person--French and English etymology tells us that since the 17th century both languages have used the Latin to describe essential guidebooks and such--vade mecum literally means "go with me" or "viens avec moi." These vademecum play off and with and against our contemporary essential portables, to supplement, replace, distract from, and counteract as needed.
ESTUAIRES/ESTUARIES, 2022-
I have several times in several parts of the world felt most at home when living next an estuary, where twice daily the salt and fresh water alternately ebb and flow, taking turns bringing their different qualities to the inhabitants and ecosystem who thrive on the restless mingling rhythms. Finding balance in a state of constant titration is a recurring pattern for me also present in my interdisciplinary multimedia artmaking and living bilingually between two languages.
* estuaries/estuaires, book 1/livre 1 - the book of hours of neuroplasticity / un livre d’heures de neuroplasticité
necessity is the parent of invention / a new book of hours for my rehabilitation; a daily concatenation of nondominant-hand writing, drawing, tarot divination, and a poem-drawing-sigil
la necessité engendre l'invention / un nouveau livre d'heures de guérison; une pratique-entraînement quotidienne et gauchere d'ecriture, dessin, tirage de tarot, et poésie magique
I had begun a new series, estuaires/estuaries, exploring the titrations and flows parallel between emigrating, acquiring another primary language, and living on a tidal estuary rhythmically reshaping itself and its environment on regular rhythmic ebbs and flows influenced by weather, the moon, and human activity. beginning to write bilingual short poems for catabolization and recombinant contemplative reassemblage via sigilization, stopping to meditate and observe at pilgrimage points along my daily walks along local rivers and rivieres. then one day i was on my bicycle, until i wasn’t, and my mostly-dominant hand for the last 50+ years was the point of contact with pavement that broke my fall and, in so doing, transferred shock waves sufficient to fracture my radius.
hand therapists recommend handwriting and drawing circles. here the vajrayana 5-element colors join with turquoise and coral to enliven the circles into elemental spheres; an accident or injury makes it easy to contemplate impermanence and mortality, and as i draw i am reminded how when the body dies it disintegrates back into the elements.
performance, ritual and process have always been a part of all my visual and textual work, at times behind the scenes or as unnamed/uncredited collaborators—now they are all to the forefront center stage at once.
upon emigrating 2 years ago i had started thinking about acquiring bilingualism as parallel to the tidal estuaries i tend to always live on, and how that location/psychogeographic influence is part of my artistic and thinking and cultural practices—i am now seeing injury-necessitated training in ambidexterity through this same lens of rhythmic but unfixed/untidy identity-knowledge boundary concepts, a systems-thinking approach to breaking down and building back, constant fluctuations and titrations. that the first dialectical tarot pull on this book of hours was strength + tower (see synthesis on drawing) seemed a confirmation of this larger process that encompasses both the rupture of breaking down and the regeneration, play, purpose.
the dialectic of injury/healing as an artistic medium normalizes/de-dramatizes/recontextualizes states of collapse, loss, breaking/breakdown, disintegration. Non linear, more cyclical. Antipurity, de-anthropocentric and reconsidering received notions of utility, beauty, efficiency.
A BOOK OF HOURS FOR THE CTHULUCENE, 2018-2020
The beginning of the Book of Hours project. Essay to accompany the 2018 exhibition in Art/Science available to read here:
Two pieces from A Book of Hours for the Cthulucene are included in the publication from Battery Journal, Uni-Verse Poetry - Prints - Proofs by Visionary Humans
Available now at: https://www.batteryjournal.org/uni-verse-poetry-prints-proofs-by-visionary-humans