Retrospective show for the 2009 Fiber Arts Fiesta Albuquerque New Mexico

Statement:
Since I now have more of my life behind me than ahead, I assembled this show as a retrospective. The earliest piece was done soon after I began learning batik in 1980, and the last was finished in 2009. Yet the theme did not come from any sense of being near the end of a long career. Rather, I was thinking of that space in which we create, a place where time does not contain us, where possibilities are unlimited.

Thoughts:
As I planned my retrospective show, I was thinking of the way in which we exist in two spaces, one the lineally limited chronos into which we are born, live, and die, and the other limitless and cosmic kairos, which some would call eternity, the spirit world, or “God’s time.”
We all experience tastes of kairos in the midst of chronos, surely some more often than others. I believe it is the space in which we create, and I go there as often as I can. But it is experienced also when we interact with another as if somehow we join our essential beings, whether the other be human or not, and I believe it can happen whether or not we are both in the same chronological space. This has always been recognized by our ancestors, who have tried to explain it with many different belief systems.

The Celts called it a “thin place.”

I have chosen to attempt to express this with the Greek words kairos and chronos, yet there are countless other words and ways to think of it. To even try to put it into words seems to limit the idea, and that defeats the process. So we talk “around” it but I think we all understand it.

May we all as creative people allow ourselves to slip often into the kairos, even as chronos draws us back. I believe we were all made to be ultimately “out of time.”

Afterword: I would like to dedicate this show to my father, who passed from chronos into kairos a few days before the opening.

© 2009, DB Bowen

All images © Dorothy Bunny Bowen