2007  "Shapeshifting New Skins"

ARTIST STATEMENT for this Series:
"Shapeshifting New Skins"

2007 Shapeshifting New Skins became a time learning through the fire about mortality, how life is not forever, that as we age we discover our skins are changing forever, that we havealways and forever been changing but it doesn't become more evident then as a woman, as a Creator of Life, when that role stops and your tides subside and your hormones ratchet a new surprise. 

Sometimes going through the fires of life means changing ourselves, growing together, growing apart but transversing the universe as Mother Earth does, pulled by the gravity of our hearts, drawn around the light that inspires us and finding our way in our own time.  As a culture we’ve lost our ways and as human beings we’ve lost our instincts but when we are more in tune to the earth and her cycles and rhythms, then we find our own hearts longings and then we grow, teaching us to listen inside and trust in that life and breath and passion and fire that is inside us all, inside every living thing.

Grandmother Pulls Me and The Fourth Age of Skin, Waboose honours all the women in life asGrandmother Moon is to Mother Earth, and us as Grandmothers, Mothers within our cycles, as daughters and as young girls I am reminded of our connections to the celestial and Creation. I am over 50 now, over half a century had me looking across the horizon with no words to describe what this was.  I was late blooming and I had discovered that I was in fact blossoming at 52.  I was finding it a very strong age to be a woman and to be blossoming.  I was discovering I had a very strong voice for what was important to me and what wasn’t, and I was deeply searching my soul for what was burning inside, but it was not resonating in a voice within the work I had completed, as it always had done before. 

For although the work was completed in November of 2007, it wouldn’t be until 2008-9, that I would find the voice inside the work.  I knew that the voice within the work had to find its own time. I was finding that I had to catch up to that sun that was trail blazing across the sky.  I had been dawdling in the waters of the past, star gazing and moon struck all at once and miss-stepping out of time. I was lost within my heart and the words to these pieces were stuck inside. So why was this taking me so long I wondered and the pain of this journey so profound, until I realized that living is a process and like the early and latter times of changes, growing through the East and West doors of fires were the most painful because those were the two times the hormones change the most: the times of sun rise and sun set are also the entrance and exit of a day, they are also the times of moving from childhood to adulthood and adulthood to old age, with family leaving and arriving in-between.  The outside world was changing and so was I, all at the same time.  I was finding a new skin too as I knew that the sun only rises and sets so many times before a leaf turns, withers and falls close to the tree so I needed to take action for what was left of my season, and lost 40 pounds.  Finding out what was important in life was in fact having more life and if I had more life and more health I would have more of it to give, to change, to inspire, to enlighten, more to help the world change and so I changed.  I shapeshifted.

  And many parts of the world needs us now, but now we sleep.  The media sleeps in a government’s keep who keep all for themselves in the biggest corporate thievery of all time.  Money is all and Mother is none and the score has been fixed this way and we’re running out of time.  All the voices are represented for all of the races in mainstream media.  All except one.  The RED one is sadly missing and so the imbalance occurs. Rise Up and Oh Canada speaks to this imbalance. Rise Up suggests that our stories need to be told by us in the Public and Catholic School systems.  For it is with our culture, our voice, our RED voice that has yet to be heard and is what the Earth needs now to heal, our instincts to return us to our connection to her, and what our history needs to be REAL is our stories told from our mouths to return our history to the rightful owners. 

Our skin needs to shapeshift into healing the past into our future. Crow Shapeshifting Human and Tempests Within speaks to that listening again to her connection, to that animal, to that totem, to that beat inside us all, to return to the physical shape of rawness, to transform for the Earth’s sake to connect to her again rather than what we plug into.  Even the lack of connection to each other marks our relations in From Me to You  as we’ve forgotten how to connect to each other.  To find what is the same, what is similar in each other for Peace sake, to follow our path even if we have to go off of it just to know with surety that we were once on it, so we can find our way back and be heard with what we've learned, like a Wolf to her Clan or like a Raven with a light.  Time is the illusion.

LauraLee K Harris