Dear Gordon

Robin Bruce is a musician-poet-visual artist whose interdisciplinary work is rooted in nature and contemplative practices. Her background as a healer in the modalities of breathwork, Buddhist meditation, yoga, and Sat Nam Rasayan inform her creations.

This art submission features reclamation paintings from Robin’s most recent book, Dear Gordon. The intention is to name, reclaim, and heal the often unspoken intergenerational trauma of American enslavement. In the maitri practice within Tibetan Buddhism, lies a mandala in five sections corresponding to five elements, colors, shapes, and emotional terroir. In their healing system, the attitude toward emotions is that they are intended to be felt, investigated, and illuminated. Every emotion has a wisdom aspect for example, the color blue symbolizes water and the transformation of anger into clarity. I positioned this aspect in the section of the book that looks at the felt sense of the middle passage, what it might have felt like to be in the ship, floating across water with no sense of destination. The circle in the collage is the symbol for vajra in the maitri mandala and was cut from the original image of Gordon’s back. This is to show that the pain doesn’t go away; that transformation is not negation.

The art instillation at Art on the Bricks will focus on reclaimed painted images of Gordon along with collages set behind an altar adorned with light, love, and nature symbols of liberation. A poetry reading with music behind it can also be included.