TRANSPARENT TO TRANSCENDENCE
Transparent to Transcendence is about transformation and the way in which Native Americans relate to the world around them. Most tribes have retained stories that explain how celestial constellations were formed and many of these stories involve children being drawn up into the sky.
I especially like the Kiowa story, as told by Scott Momaday, in which seven sisters become the stars of the Big Dipper. A similar Cherokee story describes children ascending into the sky to become The Pleiades. Both stories suggest their subjects move effortlessly and unafraid through their transformation process.
Transparent to Transcendence presents seven beeswax figures suspended at varying heights, in the formation of The Pleiades. These adolescent female figures are being drawn into the night sky, appearing to freefall up, not resisting but yielding to the process.
Based on a Kiowa myth…
Eight children were at play, seven sisters and their brother. Suddenly the boy was struck dumb; he trembled and began to run upon his hands and feet. His fingers became claws, and his body was covered with fur. Directly there was a bear where the boy had been. The sisters were terrified; they ran, and the bear after them. They came to the stump of a great tree, and the tree spoke to them. It bade them climb upon it, and as they did so it began to rise into the air. The bear came to kill them, but they were beyond its reach. It reared against the trunk and scored the bark all around with its claws. The seven sisters were borne into the sky and they became the Pleiades.
No one ever saw the sisters again. Their names were soon forgotten, though the sisters themselves were remembered, not as individual children, with particular appearances and manners, but collectively. They had become the little sisters to whom it happened. For the first days and weeks after the children disappeared, the people gathered themselves up in the dusk and waited for the stars to come out. When the stars came out and flickered on the black wash of the sky, the people were filled with wonder. Some of them made exclamations, but most remained silent and respectful, reverent even.
In the hold of such events there is little to be said.
~ Excerpted from The Ancient Child, by Scott Momaday
