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The Danforth
Museum of Art
Framingham, Massachusetts
1998
In 1997 I was
approached by the Danforth Museum to do an installation
for spring 1998. I immediately had a very clear vision of
a floating floor. I was not clear where this vision came
from, but believed that it was true.
In May of 1986,
I was working in my garden preparing for a 35th wedding
anniversary party for my parents. I was drawn to what I
had assumed to be a boarded up crawl space under my house.
When I pried off the planks I discovered a full sized room.
I cleaned the room out and had dinner in it for the anniversary
party. My mother all through the early part of the evening
kept saying, “What is behind that little door?”
When we opened the door the room had been wrapped in Mylar,
dinner had been set, candles lighted. The magic of the evening
had just begun.
In 1992 I was
invited to participate in a show at Grace Cathedral in San
Francisco. The show was scheduled for Holy Week of that
year. I started to do a series of paintings that turned
out to be the Stations of the Cross. I discovered after
I had finished that to be used as stations the images must
include crosses. I turned the paintings over and gilded
crosses on the backs of each, never to be seen, just to
be there. I realized at that time that I was making icons,
not paintings, and that these icons were going to be used
by people for meditation and prayer. After the Grace Cathedral
show the Stations disappeared for several years. They arrived
on my doorstep in the summer of 1995. I immediately took
them to the chapel/sub-basement and began following the
directions of the room to reveal the chapel that was always
there. When I thought that I had finished I decided to open
the chimney that connected the chapel with the roof five
stories above. The energy in my house had somehow been split.
I was confident that there was not much soot in the chimney
as I had cleaned it to the floor above earlier that year.
I was working carefully with my trowel when the soot let
loose. At the time I was wearing only white shorts and work
boots. I took my shorts off to cover my face as the soot
rose from the floor covering everything in total blackness.
Naked in the darkness I had a vision of an old Tex-Mex movie
with a missionary priest and the women of the village gathered
in the abandoned mission. The priest was holding a bucket
of hot soapy water. He splashed the water on the floor and
beautiful tiles were revealed. The next scene of the movie
shows candles being lighted and villagers gathering for
a service. I started to clean the chapel but could not remove
the soot from the cement floor. I got a bucket that had
belonged to my grandmother, filled it with hot soapy water
and splashed it on the floor. The soot immediately lifted.
At this point I had another vision of myself aged six, riding
to pick my father up from work. We used to pass an old fire
station that I mistook for a church. I would often wonder
what would happen if I went into that church/fire station
with a bucket of hot soapy water. I came out of this vision
and looked around at my beautiful chapel.
I was meditating
in my studio one day recently and experienced a vision of
designs for a tile floor. During the vision I saw a design
that I had made when I was in first grade. It was checkerboard
in nature with alternating purple and yellow squares, with
a purple flower in each yellow square. I remembered taking
it to show my next-door Neighbor, Mrs. Strong. She loved
it and asked me if I would make wallpaper for her. I came
out of the vision and drew out the design of my childhood
as one of the tiles for my floor. The design I then realized
was based on early Celtic patterns that I had been using
in my work for the past several years. At six I knew this
to be my nature. In the third grade a teacher was instructing
us how to draw the perfect tree. I remember there being
six steps. I was looking out the window on a beautiful fall
day, crayons in hand, drawing from my experience. At the
end of class my drawing was held up as an example of the
worst tree a child had ever drawn. That night I practiced
drawing trees using the six steps. I gave my first drawing
to the little girl, Jane, who lived across the street. Suddenly
everything was split in two. Everything had a right and
left, light and dark, wet and dry, visible and invisible.
It was a time of confusion, especially until I discovered
that the two sides could reconnect.
Last week I was
asked by my first grade nieces to visit their classes. I
decided to tell them the story of my chapel and the Story
of Mrs. Strong. After the stories I asked them to guess
what I was working on. The near unanimous response was a
beautiful tile floor. I had each child draw two tiles, one
for me and one to take home. One boy drew a time machine.
I told him that artists often traveled through time. He
asked me what I meant. I explained that I wasn’t sure
whether I was looking into the future from first grade or
whether I remembered drawing my design. He replied, Yeah!
That’s it!.
I dropped my
nieces off from school that day. My sister was five minutes
later getting home. She handed me an obituary for Mrs. Strong.
Her wake was around the corner from my sister’s house.
We dropped my nieces off at Girl Scouts and saw my other
sister driving by. We stopped her and the three of us went
to Mrs. Strong’s wake. I told her children, my childhood
friends, the story about their mother that I had told earlier
that day. We also talked of Mrs. Strong’s pussy willow
tree that had been chopped down twelve years ago, when the
Strongs moved away. Jane Nicholson, the little girl who
I had given my tree drawing to, left a bouquet of pussy
willows in the shape of Mrs. Strong's tree at the funeral
home.
All things were
suddenly reconnected once again.
For my show,
Freshwater, (the gem like qualities revealed when rocks
are wet) at the Danforth Museum I would like to build my
floating floor. I envision a floor with roughly 1400 hand
painted tiles based on early Celtic designs, themselves
based on the shape of the year and the sun's shadows, cosmograms
of the totality of the universe. I would like to surround
the floor with a moat of flowing water. The wall will be
collaged obituaries, glazed over with dark paint. The floor
will be highly polished and flooded with pools of light.
In the center of the room with be a house shaped structure,
gilded inside with silver with light almost too bright to
see. Blinded by the light and blinded by the dark I hope
to offer people a bridge between the two, just as Paul on
the road to Damascus was blinded by light for three days
after a blind man taught him to see.
Michael Dowling
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