:: 2006 - 130cm x 50cm - Digital Print on Cotton Satin ::
Salvia Channels arose out of a desire to reintegrate, both personally and artistically everything I'd learned from salvia divinorum during the first eighteen months of working with the plant. One of the feelings that strongly arose in me - and was also explored in subsequent work - was the idea that although I was on the other side of the world from the Mazatec source of this knowledge, I nonetheless felt very close to it. This familiarity and intimacy is something I had felt throughout the visions I had experienced, and the top part of the piece expresses this sense of a shared vision.
Conceived as a large format piece which contained in one form or another expressions arising from each previous salvia vision, Salvia Channels was a repositiory of knowledge for me. At the far right I placed salvia herself - La Maria I guess you could call her - and from her eyes and feet came two levels, or channels, of teachings: visionary and material. The material level expressed how the plant had journeyed from Mazatec country to Europe, and how the DNA and Salvinorin within the leaf itself passed knowledge into my body and brain. The visionary level contained symbolic representations of every picture, every image or doodle I had created in relation to salvia visions, and the intense channel of information was conceived as passing from La Maria's eyes and into my own. I seated myself at the bottom left, with pipe in mouth, at the receiving end of this remarkable download of teaching, against a background of a rising Sun, representing knowledge and the Salvic Inner Light.
