:: 2006 - 130cm x 50cm - Digital Print on Cotton Satin ::
Some two years into my salvia voyages, I came to creating a duet of mandalas which expressed something of the magical connection I truly felt to be arising out of my salvia experiences. Bridge Of Smoke was the first of these, born out of a sense that despite being on the opposite side of the world from the spiritual home of salvia divinorum and the Mazatec people, there was a part of me that felt very close indeed.
I was thinking about the phrase that people sometimes use for the practice of entheogenic pipe use - The Bridge of Smoke - and asked salvia to grant me an image that might put this phrase into a visual context. This isnt exactly (or even vaguely) what I saw, but it is what I felt, and it is what I created in sketches at the tail end of the stillness. It's a feeling of me at left, lying on the floor and shirtlessly besaged at one side of the world, and the Mazatec Woman, a representation of the salvia plant and my connection to it, being besaged at another side of the world, and the bridge linking us both. The being at the centre is another of those dreaming beings who occasionally come to visit, just to see and witness. The bridge from both sides feeds into hir, an androgyne from whose crown the lines of energetic experience emerge and cover the upper parts of the image. Underneath the bridge, one can see the winter and spring stars...
