Invited speaker in the congress ‘Spirituality and Sustainability’

http://laszlo-zsolnai.net/content/spirituality-and-business-conference

OUR COMMON LIGHT

The history of humanity begins in a garden.
The garden germinates from an infinitely small seed.
This pit contains a wise magic: matter, energy, space and time.
‘ The Dreamtime ’ … That’s what the Aboriginals call the primal blackness, before the Big Bang.

Certain dreams are audacious and limitless…
The pit swells, explodes, distends itself, giving birth to time.
Stars, galaxies and our solar system organize itself.
The fabulous promise is finally fulfilled when rains of dust of the stars sow the primitive oceans. The pure white energy of the stars impregnates the earth with life, which appears in the form of seaweed. Now, it so happens that this ‘seaweed-mother’ contains in its cells the colours of the rainbow. It is therefore, the atoms forged in the constellations to which we owe colour, which represents the passage to life.

Green was the firstborn: Chlorophyll is a natural green pigment in the plant cells, whose role is essential in the process of photosynthesis. Green arrives long before the fish and the birds because it is the colour of origin.

The ancient cultures already knew the relationship between life and light. Between colours and energy.
We are beings borne of light.
The work of life travelled the mystical intuition of our ancestors, and keeps something impenetrable and intangible, like the art of any genius.

The ancestral knowledge is transmitted through myths and fairy tales, but also through the etymology of words. They illuminate the earth and the story of humanity’s origin and sometimes draw us towards surprising discoveries.
Let us take the word colour. Color is a Latin word and its etymology helps us to go back to the source of life.
Color is linked to the group: celare which means: to hide, to hold secret, to hide from the eyes, from knowledge…
Is it possible that the word colour contains the great secret of the creation of the world and that this mystery is to remain forever inaccessible?

Plants and their colours rooted their energy deep in the tissue of those living on Earth. In the blood of the human slips salt of the sea, our first mother, in our veins flow the shadows of plantlife.

Our common value is nature. Wellspring of light, she centres us again in the cosmos and invites us to seek out and dilate the senses. If we listen long enough, she opens our imagination to spirituality and beauty and can help us to create a respectful and harmonious humanity.

With the emergence of conscience, the human being could contemplate the garden. The relation ship to art and the beauty of the universe is as old as humanity. By associating colours and lining up words, according to astrophysicist Hubert Reeves, humans pursue the creative activity of nature, which she has deployed for 15 billion years.

I remember the first time I saw the tattooed skin of a Maori in New Zealand. The drawings seemed to be inspired from the trunk of a tree fern and could have been interpreted as: “I am the fern, I am the tree; nature is me and I am nature…” So I said to myself: “This Maori man carries with him the Maori signs inscribed in the collective memory, he has traced on his skin the message the ancients already knew: Nature is part of us, it is indelible and I must never forget this! ”
Carried by this revelation, I began to explore.

I imagine the pictures of the past that are certainly anchored deep in our bodies, and try to make them reappear through my paintings and my sculptures, like the storyteller. I search how to release what we have not known but what flows in the depths of our souls. The similarities between humans and plants do not expose themselves right away, because the ancestral footprints are hidden under the silent veil of nature. And yet, our knowledge is linked to those little things so close to our eyes. The salt of our tears, memories of a bygone time, the way our palms open and close like flowers, our five fingers and the five points of the star, our veins and the branches of trees, our bones and the stone. Nature inscribes itself in human beings and human beings inscribe themselves into nature.

In the imagery of my work, mysterious divinities are represented through symbols of femininity, that is to say, symbols of fertility and the creative force. They represent the creation of the universe and the forces of life on earth. My goddesses are the center of the world around them, they reign over their respective kingdoms, the plant, the animal, the mineral. All in all, they are the mothers of nature in its entirety, and make me reconnect with the silent traces of the passage of time.
In my painting, metaphors call to one another. I immerse myself in them, revealing the message of the invisible. A foot becomes a root, hair a crown of leaves, arms a vee of branches. I invent tattoos: flowering twigs. Sensual creepers embrace bodies, the yellow sap of grass runs under the skins of their faces. I have always wanted birds to nest in our hair, I paint what it would be like to have sparrows and robins coming to roost in our locks … I marvel at the divine proportions of shells of snails. Nature, generous and sublime, invades my senses and I become an esthete, all I want is to contemplate this magnificence.

As a child, plants and animals nourished me, they also fed my imagination: the bluetit, the wild orchid, the whale, the grizzly… Inspired so many emotions, still very much alive!

For children to come we have to protect this natural and cultural heritage.
With every species that goes extinct, humanity mutilates its imagination profoundly. With the death of the white bear we lose a piece of our fantasy. With the death of the giant sequoia, we amputate our own freedom…

MacMillan, a 19th century American ornithologist, has already alerted the world by writing:
« We must save the condors not only because we need the condors but also because we need to develop the necessary qualities to save them; because these are this qualities that we shall need to save ourselves. »

Corinne Boureau
September 2012