Two Black swan swimming across the surface of this water, caste deep, almost troubled reflections will exist only for only a few moments.
I drew these two fountain pen and ink drawing of black swans gliding through dawn a few years ago. I re-created them into dream-like images where the black swans becomes recurring morning ghosts. They glide through dapples of light and shadows hinting of times and memories now lost, now found. Strange and brief reflections not quite echoing the newly awakening earth and sky form in the swans passing wake, and then vanish.
The black swan perhaps seeks the sometimes fading, sometimes perilous beauty and danger of nebulous times like the dawn, and boggy landscapes like shifting wetland swamps. Revealing and concealing brief passages, and sudden changes that go mostly unseen, and are so often destroyed by our bulldozing and indifferent minds. Fertile history, times and shifting water and lands that have forever been drained because we fear their unstable inconvenience, and their hidden often fever-ridden depths. Our memories and imagination cannot not perceive the swamplands tough, yet tragically transient magic, and its ancient senses of watery, muddy being and belonging.
The word liminality describes this fleeting junctions of brief ever-changing magical times transformation and everyday reality. The liminal times and places are gateways are the borders between these seemingly un-linked events, places or things. For me, these Black swans are the guardian of the Imagination, “the Pipers at the Gates of Dawn.”
