:: 2018 :: 30cm x 90cm :: Acrylics, Inks and Markers on Canvas ::
This piece has a complex story attached to it, and an equally relationship with two previous artworks. Having integrated much of what I learned in Colombia, some ten months later I decided to sit ceremony with Ayu and follow up a few points from the indigenous teachings and my delicate coca visions to see if I could go deeper and learn more.
I found some notes on a teaching that Muisca elder Dwe Wiby had given me when standing in front of my Chiguexica Muisca artwork. He related that when Bachué (or Bagué as the modern Muisca say) entered Lake Iguaque to find her son in the waters, this child was in reality a reincarnation of Chiminigagaua, the Muisca creator (and Bagué’s great-grandfather) who he called “the light in the darkness at the beginning of time…”
Wiby explained that while there was the light of day, and the dark of night, inside this darkness was a deeper light – the light in the darkness – and at one point seemed to be suggesting that my delicate coca visions might be of this nature. When I re-discovered these notes I had written at the time, it prompted a curious question about my first set of coca visions, experienced at the retreat in Colombia, and in particular the maloca to which the seed-boat women were bringing gifts of coca, narrated in the artwork Seeds of the Coca Mother.
I wondered why my visions had not taken me into the maloca, and so I resolved to explore this. Sitting ceremony with Ayu, I ‘entered’ the maloca and saw a central fire, around which many hummingbirds were gathering, drawing nectar from the flames. Above them, I beheld again the face of what I have come to recognise as la madre de coca, in a Medusa-like form with both leaves and snakes for hair. This artwork, then, fuses this vision of explorations ‘inside’ the maloca and the teaching of Dwe Wiby which facilitated it, and at the base we see Bagué over the waters, with Chiminigagua emerging, representing the light in the darkness which gives the artwork its name
