The Body as Cave
For over two decades my life‘s work has been underground. As a National Geographic explorer, archaeologist and photographer, I have documented Paleolithic cave art in the Americas and Europe. My field is not art history yet I have sat in darkness where human hands, 40,000 years ago, created images on stone with pigment and breath.
My studio practice begins where that fieldwork ends. In 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement in New York City, that archive became an urgent language. Businesses boarded up their windows with plywood, creating a new, temporary wall across SoHo. I responded with what I knew: the first human gesture. Esperanza/Hope (6/20/2020) was painted directly on plywood in SoHo. Two hands, bound not with rope but with woven maize, the sacred crop of my heritage. Stenciled in the exact negative hand technique utilized by ancient cave artist around the world. The text is bilingual because survival is bilingual. One hand is flame, one is corn silk. The piece was created as street barricade and has since been exhibited as a historical artifact of that moment at the City Museum of New York (2021 New York Responds Exhibit). It is protest art, but it is also cave art remade.
That public work revealed my private thesis, which I have been developing since in large scape ink and charcoal: The Body as Cave. Proof that the first art is still the most urgent.
The Body as Cave / Diptych
Abstract ink and charcoal painting on paper with two dark oval forms and curved brown wash, organic cavernous shapes, cave art inspired,
Abstract ink and charcoal painting on paper with biomorphic organic lines.
Abstract ink and charcoal painting on paper with dark central teardrop and white flowing lines, inspired by ancient cave formations.
Abstract ink and charcoal painting with grey oval and interwoven back and white ribbons, brown underpainting.
Abstract ink and charcoal painting with interwoven back and white, black and brown spaces, a vision and projection of a body into the cavern.
The Body as Cave / The Origin
Charcoal on paper, the first mark before the diptych, before HOPE. There was a smear of charcoal that looked like an owl and a torso at the same time, I didn’t correct it, I followed it. In ancient times, the cave artists would have seen a bulge in the rock and would have painted something over it, The cave dictated their vision. This owl-torso was my rock telling me what to paint. I keep it pinned on my wall so that I always remember not to invent the body but listen to it.
The Monument
