Breathing With the Cosmos: Swamp, Energy, and Returning to Mother Earth

While meditating on the wetlands, my work very quickly morphed into something older and larger—a dialogue among earth processes, psychic processes, and the cosmic unfolding itself.

My practice is rooted in the modernist tradition—Expressionism, Surrealist automatism, where the unconscious is a generative force—reaching back into the ancient Goddess cultures that honors the female and Mother-Earth as the origin of life, transformation, and meaning. This recognition of the goddess is where my work breathes.

These paintings live at the intersection of Adorno’s aesthetics, Ch’an cosmology as interpreted by David Hinton, and the feminine divine.

Adorno: Revoking the Separation of Feeling and Understanding

Adorno argues that modern art attempts to undo what he calls the “fatal separation” between feeling and understanding—a division philosophy imposed for centuries. Modernism resists this split by making meaning and emotion inseparable in the very form of the artwork.

These paintings embody that principle:

—The layers of pigment aren’t decorative for quick consumption, they are the thinking.

—The gestural marks create forms from the tensions embedded in material.

—The swamp’s shifting ground becomes a metaphor for the dissolution of rigid categories and non-identity.

In This series,  immersion rather than detached contemplation, will give clarity.

These paintings and works are not solely based on observations of the swamp; rather they are offered as an immersive experience, to pull us into the cosmos. 

That’s the crux of Adorno’s aesthetic truth: meaning arises only when you allow yourself to be absorbed by the artwork’s internal contradictions and energies.

David Hinton: Ch’an Cosmology and the Breath of the World

In contrast to Adorno’s philosophy of aesthetics, which emphasizes the tensions of the society and the art, David Hinton speaks of the cosmos as a continuous unfolding—a single breath expanding and contracting across time.

Through his understanding of Ch’an Buddhism, the universe is not a collection of objects but a field of transformations. Everything arises from emptiness, manifests briefly, and dissolves back.

In these paintings:

—heat rises as qi,

—water opens into sky,

—pigments drift like cosmic breath,

—and figural hints appear like fleeting articulations of the Tao and the generative.

The swamp becomes a metaphor for the world; nothing fixed, everything in process, every boundary porous.

Feminine Divine and MotherEarth

The Goddess cultures of the Paleolithic and Neolithic period, from approximately 40,000 BCE to 1200 BCE, honored earth as a living presence.  The clay sculptures engage that tradition directly, as do the paintings in more elemental ways.

Here the feminine divine is not represented but it is embodied:

—in the curves of heat rising like breath from the original womb of earth;

—in the never ending cycles of decay and renewal;

—in the swamp as sacred matrix of the cosmos;

—in the archetypal figures that emerge and dissolve like memory from the collective unconscious.

This work is part of my ongoing reclamation of pre-patriarchal values: collaboration, reciprocity, and reverence for the Earth that sustains us.

Jung: Coniunctio, or the Merging of Opposites

These paintings enact what Jung called coniunctio: the merging of opposites into a higher unity.

• The conscious and unconscious,

• the cosmic and the earthly,

• the abstract and the figurative,

• the personal and the collective,

The forms that appear—sometimes only a shadow or gesture—are patterns surfacing from the psychic depths, from the generative. This is the soul speaking through the material.

Ecology, Earth Justice, and the Swamp

The swamp is not a picturesque landscape; it is a tell, an excavation of a political and ecological site.

It resists domestication.

It escapes the categories of “productivity” and “profit.”

It frustrates the extractive logic of patriarchy, ownership, and market values.

In honoring its processes, I am honoring an ecological ethic: nature not as resource, but as relationship.

CONCLUSION

In this series, form, breath, earth, and psyche converge.

If there is a single thread running through these works, it is this:

the Earth is still breathing, and we can learn to breathe with her.