Pictures of Earth Mother

I just got a message from Warren from Land of Odds, and he told me that I could definitely post more pictures of my Earth Mother:Rachel's Dream here on my blog. I'm hoping later to devote a full page over on my website once I get things together & do some major work on it as we haven't touched it for two full years. Okay, so here she is...Rachel's Dream.

I've been doing recycled themes this year & I haven't missed incorporating items even in this big challenge piece. The actually base of this work is a $2.25 butcher block cutting board that I got at the thrift store. I also used vintage pieces of jewelry that I bought at a flea market, a beanie babie (blue jay!), and buttons from a coat.

Rachel is dedicated to Rachel Carson who wrote Silent Spring. The story that I wrote as a companion to this work tells the story of a dream where I come upon a figure crouching looking at this mystical scene of Mother Earth laying on her stomach, kicking her feet along to the music of the animals surrounding her, and painting flowers. The figure turns to me & ask how I followed her, and I say "through you book". I in my late 50s & the world I grew up in before the EPA and individuals embracing
the cleaning up of pollution was just
that...polluted! I breathed industrial waste where ever I lived weather it was the Los Angeles basin or the Ohio River valley. I never saw stars in the sky until we took a trip outside of Los Angeles & I actually didn't know what they were. I rarely saw the Sun due the pollution, and the smells were horrible. The beaches were covered with debris, the roadsides were eye sores with garbage, the waters were polluted with chemical run off, the school yards were feet from fields sprayed with chemicals. It was a pretty bad place to grow up in. I didn't know what would have killed me first...the nuclear bombs threatening to rain down on us daily, or the chemicals we ingested. I grew up in a very frightening time.

Then in 1965, my junior high school science teacher had us read a small piece of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. We talked about ecology, and there it was out there in the open even for school children. The plead to save our Earth, before we killed IT and US together. Rachel died shortly after her book came out due to breast cancer, but she has been with me since the day I read her opening chapter about a world without birds, without fish or insects or flowers or small animals or US.

Oh things are not perfect, but I breath cleaner air, I drink safe water, and the skies are actually blue with twinkling stars dotting the black night skies. I don't worry like I did while I was growing up about the poisons invading my body while I walk in the parks or drink from a spring. Like I said, still not perfect, but aware.

I'll be posting more pictures in the future with explanations about each section. This is all pieces done individually and then assembled together. I started this all back in January of this year.