“Life on the Tip of a Volcano”
12”x12”x1”
Mixed Media on Panel
There’s another piece in progress that prefaces and informs this work. In that scene, I sit on the edge of a cliff at the end of the road that I lived on for 23 of my 30 years on Maui. From that cliff I would stare out into the vastness of the ocean, listening to the North Shore waves crashing below. Thousands of miles from the nearest landmass, I felt acutely the isolation of these exquisite islands, and a new thought arose. Those of us who had moved here from elsewhere had, consciously or unconsciously, chosen to remove ourselves from the mainstream and had decided to live on the tip of a massive volcano in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And when I later discovered that Mauna Kea, measured from ocean floor to peak, is the tallest mountain in the world, surpassing even Mt. Everest, it reminded me of how incredibly minute we are in the face of such a grand and fiery presence. It’s humbling, to say the least. It’s also very empowering.
