Bringing of the Moon

Bringing in of the Moon takes as a starting point the idea of the Lumbini garden, being prepared for the birth of Buddha as a maiden gently holds and cares for the glowing light of the moon.

However the garden in the image is the Australian garden. The image was taken on a sheep and cattle farm in central west NSW using the artist’s daughter as a model. Taken at dawn, the image heralds in the birth of a new day and was set in a natural rocky grotto on a small hill.

Using a distinctly Australian setting for the staging of the scene allows a dialogue of cross cultural transpositions to occur, where the religion of Buddhism is transposed into a new area and an Australian audience who bring to it their own cultural understandings. Just as the bush in Australia is slightly different and unique to its own Australian climate, religions in Australia will have their own dynamics and ways
of interpreting and understanding spirituality that are influenced by the Australian cultural way of life.

The Australian bush has long held deep spiritual significance for Australians, from the first Indigenous inhabitants to the many bush chapels that were set up in Colonial times. The bush is ancient and holds its markers of time with dignity, its trees shading rocks that have not moved for eons and have been resting places for countless people and animals over time. The bush sings with deep significance that can be described as a mysticism of nature and that we seek to tap into when we take a quiet moment of sitting in nature.

This mysticism, then, can reflect that essential love, joy and hope that the birth of Buddha bought forth. Surrounded by celebrations partaken by humans, animals and nature the event held the natural world in the highest regard as its beauties and riches were bought forth in ecstasy.

The image is a small reflection on this magnitude. It is a quiet reverie where the idea of a moon being chaperoned as it moves onto its cycle, being held just for a moment before it cycles into its waxing and waning revolution once more to mark the passing on the days and nights and the travelling of time. What if time stopped for a moment, if the moon’s path was halted to allow the wonders of hope through spirituality to be experienced in an event like no other.

My artwork is most often a response to themes that I follow in my research and one of my long-term guiding themes has been how we use our physical bodies to interpret space and create subjectivity, which follows on with understanding spirituality, or the mystical, through a subjective paradigm that infuses body mind and spatiality.