Ancestor(Terra Diva)
Ancestor(Terra Diva) · 2026 · Mixed Media on Paper · 7 x 5 in.
A bilaterally symmetrical cut-paper form in black layered over a vivid cobalt blue rectangle on a burnt-orange painted ground, arriving at a glyph or totem from a civilization that understood the world as a single continuous system before language divided the natural from the sacred.
- Medium
- Mixed Media on Paper
- Substrate
- Paper
- Dimensions
- 7 x 5 in.
- Edition
- Unique
- Status
- Available
- Inventory
- AX-2026-001
- Scale
Drawn to scale from the recorded dimensions, against a sofa. Not a photograph of an installation.
From the series Before Words
The ground of this work is raw sienna, one of the oldest pigments in human history, found in the cave paintings at Lascaux and used continuously by artists from the ancient Romans through Rembrandt. It is named for the city-state of Siena in Tuscany, where it was quarried from the iron-rich clay of the earth. It is the pigment in its unaltered state, before fire transforms it into the deeper reddish-brown of burnt sienna. The ground here has not been changed. It carries the earth as it came.
Over it, a blue bilateral form pressed upward, vertical, pointed at both ends, arms extending outward like a figure claiming its place at the boundary between two worlds. Blue against raw earth is one of the oldest color oppositions in human symbolic vocabulary: sky over ground, the celestial over the terrestrial, the axis mundi connecting what is above to what is below.
The title names what the form does. The ancestor stands between realms. Terra Diva, the divine earth, is what it stands on. The ground has not yet been transformed by fire. The figure above it already has.