Artwork
Artwork
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S T E P H A N I E R A Y N E R
BOAT OF ETERNAL RETURN
The Boat of Eternal Return is thirty feet long and the cello head is nine feet high from base
"Boats are like Shamans – they move between worlds.
Being of neither world, they glide over the taut membranes
that separate The Opposites." - Stephanie Rayner
floating black bier, 13 pair of moose ribs, DNA sequencing gels from the Human Genome Project
"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a long time." - Andre Gide
In the making of this artwork, Stephanie Rayner considers her experiences similar to those of Odysseus:
"A boat, a fourteen-year journey, and the keeping of a promise. With every Odyssey the individual summons, monsters, temptation, distractions and fears. To move thought these, while trying to keep faith in the process and in one's self, inevitably merges the evolution of the artwork with one's own being."
Prow of boat with enlarged carved thumbprint on keel
Looking into interior - prow of boat
Prow interior - Mare pelvis
Top view
Detail - floating black bier - thirteen pair of moose ribs
Boat of Eternal Return
Boats are like Shamans – they move between worlds
Being of neither world
they glide over the taut membranes that separate
The Opposites
Throughout time and disparate cultures it is the boat
that has provided mytho-religious passage across the
dark straits that
separate the living from the dead
Being gently rocked by water attends one’s beginning
and one’s end
the wake stirring the membrane edges of what was
and what is to be
People ask, ”The rib boat, how did it come to you? “
In the beginning, all creation starts, I believe, with a small still point
Infinitely small
enormous with potential
Then, a blink of an eye, and one can only grope half-
blind
along the red shift ripples left by that
expanding energy
For me, ripples from Eternal Return lead back to a
scene
half horror, half fairytale…
Hair as black as ravens
lips as red as blood
skin as white as snow
In a January, twenty years ago, I was taken to the
necropolis pit in a wilderness park
There, out of the crystalline snow, arched great racks of
ribs — red
with ragged flags of flesh drooping between the white of
bone
Black trees ringed the pit
tall and massed with ravens as thick on the limbs
as leaves
It is from this pit
That the boat’s thirteen pair of moose ribs come
*
A ripple moves across the black water of a small lake
It is
a perfect circle
set in the center of a dense forest
so the wind rarely makes the dark water sparkle
The lake is one
of only two of its kind in the world
There is no shore
It is a cylinder of frigid water, tinged with tannin, eighty
feet deep
The lake bottom is so cold the eons of leaves that have
fallen in its water do not rot Without decay or the
stirring of wind, the water contains so little oxygen that
it will not support life
It is my father’s small lake – and the long slim boat his
Inuit kayak
And it is here, in the lake’s warmer surface water, I
learn to swim
I am allowed to flash around in the thin skin boat
with the painted double paddle, as long as I trail behind
a black inner tube tied to me by
a long rope
My father says that if I drown he can pull up my body
by this rope so it will not spoil the lake for others
He calls it a lifeline
To me, at seven years, this perfect black circle is a deep,
darkly abiding, unblinking eye looking back
at God
Some days I try to do the same, lying flat in the kayak
all but my head enshrouded by its canopy
eyes open wide
while far below, deep down in the dark water
my lifeline
drifts
This is where the kayak part of the boat may have come
from
*
I place the hard black circle to my eye socket, open my
eye, and look into gray mist
My artworks deal with science and spirituality, and so I
have been granted access to one of many labs working
worldwide on
The Human Genome Project
I begin turning the knob on the massive electron
microscope
and see nothing but grey mist – and then
I begin to fall
through the rabbit hole of smaller and smaller
past wisps of darker gray
down, down…
coming up to a piece of black screen
to the screen
through a hole in the screen
down, down…
and then, very deep down
there it is--
A tiny black rope of
DNA
The DNA sequencing gels
in the black bier
floating between the ribs of the boat
come from the kindness of a geneticist
working on the Genome Project
*
I have heard of a Japanese religious ritual that involves
the cutting down of a mature plum tree just before it is
about to blossom
It is then taken to a shrine
and venerated
for opening
into full blossom even as
it dies
It is the coming together of opposites
Creation and Death
Geneticists have not found a gene
for the spirit that infused Mozart’s dying body as he
wrote
The Requiem
Though, by strange coincidence, every set of DNA has
the
Exact number of lines needed to write music
The music on the DNA sequencing gels
on the bottom of the boat’s black bier
is a copy of The Requiem score as the dying Mozart
wrote it:
staffs, adagio, treble clefs . . . and notes
row upon row of pits and black pools
all with lifelines attached
The Requiem is a great work of art
And great works of art, I believe
come from the far side of what I will call The River
the collective unconscious
the world soul
There is no time, no gender, nor any one culture in this
River
It flows with the distillate of what it is to be human
It is not always beautiful
but
it is always powerful
*
I have wondered if art and creativity are a balance to
the great weight that is the knowing of our own
mortality
If so
spirit levels are needed
And if all things come into the world bringing
the balance of their opposite, is it then the same boat
now returning from its
dark crossing
moving like a loom’s shuttle
between opposite shores
that weaves with its recurring rippled wave
a matrix for Art?
What I do know is that all Art is the language the soul
speaks
It speaks louder than death
and
has always been
humanity’s lifeline
*
But, where the source for the spirit that moves the boat
comes from – that I do not know
To that spirit
I bow my head
Stephanie Rayner 2015
Boat blessed by Buddhist nuns
COMPONENTS
13 pair of moose ribs
A five foot long black bier
An old black ruler cut at random intersected by pairs of dice. DNA sequencing gels from The Human Genome Project
A copy of the score (written in Mozart’s hand) of The Requiem is overlaid on the DNA gels in black archival ink
A carved oversized cello head
An oversized cello fret board
A cello stringcatcher
Two cello bows
Hand worked glass bones/pegs in the cello head
Fingerprints are carved as the “eyes” of the boat
on both sides of the keel/beak at the prow
Pine lap strakes
Tulip poplar
Mahogany
Ebony
Guanaco coccyx
A mare pelvis
A spirit level