Behold:
The Art of Rose Wognum Frances
By Stephanie
Hiller
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"I
am she of ten thousand
names"
by Rose W. Frances
(1988)
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An
altar makes visible that which is invisible
and brings near that which is far away; it
marks the potential for communication and
exchange between different but necessarily
connected worlds, the human and the
divine.
Kay
Turner, Beautiful Necessity
[See Review,
next]
Rose
Wognum Frances lives
with her partner in a typical two-story house in
a very tidy subdivision in Santa Rosa,
California -- not a likely home for a witch. But
that only goes to show that goddessing women are
found everywhere, ready to surprise the
unwitting traveller in the automated streets of
our apparently sterile modern world with an
occult connection to a way of being that is
generic to our sex, if often suppressed.
Appearances do not conform to expectation; She
can pop up in front of a glittering screen in
the computer lab at the Junior College, or as
the woman doing your hair in the little beauty
salon next to Safeway. Vibrant women, each with
her own code, all participating in the same
exuberant irrepressible woman-spirit.
And Rose likes that
diversity, she loves it. The co-director of the
Women's Spirituality Master's Program at New
College West of California in San Francisco, she
loves academia because "it entails freedom of
thought.
"We'll never define
women's spirituality, I hope. It's always in
motion." Her voice has a scratchy edge to it,
but the rhythm and the tone of her cadences is
entrancing. "Do you know?" Not extremely tall,
she gives the impression of height. Her presence
has authority which springs from a deeper root
than the addiction to some compelling absolute.
"There will never be one definition of "the
Goddess" which will speak for all women's
experience of Her." As she talks, she guides her
straight mid-length hair back from her
face.
"I love it that we as
feminists are never going to agree. We're trying
to express something very complex. Complete
agreement would be so tedious -- rules and
dogma."
For Rose Frances, it
matters not at all what you call it or how you
seek it, which tradition you espouse or pursue.
For her, integrity is what's key, and
authenticity the measure. Indefinable
attributes, perhaps, but ones which can be felt.
In her classes at New College, a nun joins a
wiccan priestess and a Jungian analyst in the
study of women's spirituality, and each has her
own approach, offers up her own
ritual.
"I don't ever want to
find the truth of it, only what the truth is for
myself." Personal integrity is the strong,
fierce thread that runs through her
conversation, weaving together her art, her
spirituality, and her conscience.
"It's the object
itself, the scrolls, which in and of themselves
are endowed with a certain spiritual power
because they are treated in a certain
way."
She embarked on a quest
to find that "inner vivifying spirit" and
translate it through the medium of her art the
way artists like Van Gogh have done. To achieve
it, she adopted certain rules. "I wanted to
discipline myself so I wouldn't have visionary
experiences except when I was doing my art.
"Once you have those
parameters in place, you can leap into that void
that they frame." Art became her spiritual
practice. "With art, you're always brought back
into the physical reality of your hands holding
the material, molding and shaping it.
Transcendence and immanence are co-existing,
both active and present in the same moment, the
same action."
Exploring in nature, she
would discover the inner territory she sought to
express, but the thread would break before she
could weave it into her art. Then one day,
working with a ball of clay, a magical
transmutation occurred. It was the breakthrough
she had been seeking. [Read Rose Frances'
Story
of the Pot]
Since
then, Rose has placed her distinctive
signature on the
triptychs she has created, three-dimensional
mixed-media boxes with doors that frame the
moment of sacred connection. For a number of
years, she supported herself by creating these
private chambers, and although the sales
transactions were made through a third party,
she had uncanny experiences of creating the very
thing that was wanted, as if she had been lifted
while she worked into that space between the
worlds where the buyer's personal intention
could be transmitted through her hands into the
object. Wonderful synchronicities occurred, like
when her agent said a man had come in looking
for a staff, and it turned out Rose was already
creating one which manifested his description of
what he said he wanted in every detail. "I
realized later that often I was creating altars
for particular people, though that's not what I
was aware of as I created them. Each altarpiece
was created out of my lived spiritual
experience."
That magic of creativity
is akin to sexuality. "They come from the same
source. I now know there's a name for that fire.
It's 'shakti,' it's Chi. There are many names
all over the world for that flame that ignites
sexuality, creativity and our experiences of the
sacred. All three often involve a surrender of
ordinary consciousness &endash; so that they're
frightening in that sense, that you have to
surrender your ordinary
consciousness."
Art, sexuality and the
sacred &endash; in goddess traditions these are
all aspects of the same current of being, an
"underground stream" of deep awareness that is
the feminine. "When we go most deeply into our
own experience, that which is most exquisitely
and specifically our own, we reach the place of
profound connection with others. So instead of
being isolating, sacred art experience builds
connection."
That connection, however
it may be discovered, is the essence of women's
spirituality. It's an unbroken link with our
ancient heritage, a lineage that informs.
"To express our vision
for cultural transformation in the present and
future, which is inspired by the ancient past --
we need to be able to read the artifacts and be
able to imagine that story in our own present
and future. We can't just do it in words, it's
not enough. The story needs other kinds of
language, language of dance, the language of
food, music, symbol and myth, the sacred chants
in which each word has multiple layers of
meaning."
Do we really have enough
information to know what these ancient cultures
were about?
"No, we
imagine this to be so.
"Archeomythologist
Marija Gimbutas' interpretations of her
incredible discoveries bring forth for all of us
the possibility of cultures in which the arts
are central, in which people lived in peace and
with social justice. Her finds bring to us the
possibility of a Goddess of enormous depth and
vastness, overarching and underlying all of
creation.
"In Catal Huyuk, the
great goddess of Anatolia as she's called, who
is giving birth with an arm on the backs of two
leopards&endash; this is a woman in harmony with
the wild. That little figure was found in a
grain storage place. Now, that makes some
archeologists say she can't be important because
she was found in a grain storage place.
[But] the storage of grain is an
enomously important human accomplishment,
reflected in the art and myths of ancient
cultures. If you've read the poems about Inanna
from Sumer (a very different place) she is
called Storehouse of Grain; she is also the
morning and evening star as well as Queen of
Heaven and Earth. You need to have a mythic
consciousness to be able to interpret this. If
we look at it through the lens of our own
values, in which women's work is separated from
that which is important, that home is not the
important arena but the institutions are, we
cannot comprehend this placement of a holy
object in what seems such a homely ordinary
place. But if we read the myths and imagine that
this is a world that has a profoundly different
set of guiding values, then we see this statue
in a very different way."
Art was embedded in the
culture; it was a celebration of the sacred in
the mundane, in the daily, monthly, and yearly
cycles.
"When you study this
material of women's spirituality, it gives you a
very different idea of history, cultural theory,
even psychology, and often touches something
deep within each woman that studies it. And if
she can live from that place of depth and
authenticity and passion, the path tends to
unfold before her.
"One of my friends saw a
little sign pasted at a bus stop. It said, Leap
and the net will appear. I think that if you
develop within you that strong sense of
connection and spirit, you can draw on that, and
the next step will unfold. I've heard many
stories by women that corroborate
this."
From the far distant
neolithic, we draw inspiration as from an
ancient well. Hence there is a tendency to
presume that the ancient world was utopian. This
can become a problem in women's spirituality.
"There's a wishful idealism that there was no
suffering in the time of the Goddess cultures.
But of course there's always suffering. Even if
you don't have war, babies die, people get hurt,
things happen which are painful. As Betty de
Shong Meador says, the ancient myths express a
worldview that embraces the full terror and the
beauty of what is .
"When I inherited the
program at CIIS, there was a lot of disagreement
and discussion about the vision of the program
and the definition of women's spirituality. As I
worked with the community, I realized part of
what creates that discord among us is an
unrealizable utopian view of the Goddess
cultures of the ancient past." She likens that
kind of naive idealism to the "Sunday school"
interpretation of Christianity in which the
worldly present is sandwiched between the
innocent golden era of Eden and the new
Jerusalem to come. Such a view enforces the idea
of the split between spirit and matter and
allows for desecration of the planet and a
devaluing of human experience.
For Rose, the reality is
"very very different, it's a spiral, not a line,
and it's about the miraculous in every day.
There's always a movement. She changes
everything She touches. When I feel despair and
hit bottom, I circle upward into a previously
unknown creative possibility."
Death too is part of
that process, but again, Rose is cautious about
romanticizing the journey back to the womb of
the mother.
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"From 1971 to
1982 I was making pieces about death
and transcendence and on one piece I
wrote these words of Chief Seattle,
'There is no death, there's only a
change of worlds.' These are beautiful
words; they express my still-held
belief that the soul lives
on.
"But I stopped
making those pieces when my dear friend
died. I never made a piece like that
again. No death, only a change of
worlds? Sure, but I am missing Lani, I
want her! And I mourned and I sobbed
and I cried and I felt it so strongly.
I really got it that all of my
philosophy did nothing to help relieve
my pain, and I didn't want relief. I
wanted to feel fully the agony of that
loss. I made an artwork about Lani,
using her art materials which her
husband gave me, and it is filled with
my tears.
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Of my
bones are crystals made - detail
(1982)
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"Really ancient people
when they mourned, they allowed themselves to
experience that pain. Inanna tells Ninshuber to
tear at her face. There is real
grief!"
But today, talking in
her small sunny studio, we are not grieving, we
are basking in the promise of an unfolding
culture, an evolving imagination that emerges
from deep inside a woman's being. The room is
full of Rose's presence, altars to her
creativity, collections of feathers, shells,
rocks and a neat rack of music tapes, all
organized, all endowed with the love of
translucent moments captured in the remnants and
visible evidence of a divine existence. This is
her special place. Privacy is
important.
And Rose is feeling very
optimistic.
She feels reaffirmed by
the younger generation. "They take my breath
away! The sons of feminist women are
unbelievable, and the daughters. The young women
that come into the program, they think so
differently. They're really amazing." The
kinship she has found in women's community
&endash; the rich tapestry of our shared
interests, our intersecting lives -- persuades
her that we live in very special
times.
"Maybe we're not all
living on the commune, and the revolution didn't
happen like we thought -- but it did! We are
living something that's a treasure, we are
really living something that we couldn't have
made up."
Rose is going hiking
with a friend this afternoon. I am going home,
clutching tapes, notes, and a new connection
that reverberates with the energy of a blessing
tenderly shared, and profound: uncommon
expression, which speaks to the understanding of
an ancient truth we hold in common.
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Crystal
Cabinet (1980)
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