The Sacred Landscape
Sometimes I am certain that life is saturated with meaning. Meeting Bernie Masterson and seeing her work Drawing on the Body was one of those times. I had been away for a day and an evening of sacred dancing entitled Dancing on the Bones at Samain. Samain is the old Celtic pagan festival of New Year at the beginning of November. We know it best from the remnant celebration of Halloween and the Christian overlays of All Hallows and All Saints. It is a time to honour the spirits of our ancestors, a time of death and rebirth, when the veil is especially thin between this and unseen worlds. It is the old New Year because it was also the time for seed sowing and with it the hope of new life springing up once more.
On my way home through Dublin the following day I called to meet Bernie and see her new work. Bernie’s landscape paintings, which so poetically and passionately express her total immersion in the inner and outer experience of place and nature, still did not prepare me for the impact thisnew series was to have. It was as if the dances of the previous day guided me to a between-the-worlds place of shattering intimacy and power.
In the warm of her kitchen, and without explaining why, Bernie recounted with love and humour stories about her mother, Jeannie, who had died two years earlier at over ninety years old. A redoubtable woman certainly – born in Co. Antrim, a midwife and hospital matron who, in her late thirties,had married and gone to have six children. Judging by the photos and a portrait I was shown, she had a lovely face.
Bernie led me through the garden to her studio.
After Jeannie broke her femur when she was eighty-six, her health declined and she was cared for by her family in her own home. Bernie stayed with her every second week. One day Jeannie remarked to Bernie that her arms were lined with age and Bernie made a drawing. It looked like the bark of a tree, Jeannie said. So began an extraordinary collaboration. Jeannie, ever keen to be useful, proffered new parts she found on her body that might be of interest, thus enabling her daughterto give birth to Drawing on the Body.
Inside the studio the work was laid all about me.
Great integrity and skill extends to the precise making of the ground - pristine white gesso panels - on which the images are laid. Monochrome drawings and paintings record the organic landscape of the body. Just as the landscape of our earth carries the scars and records of natural events and human shaping through time, so the body is a record of experience; an expression of a uniquely lived life. Such was the bond between this mother and daughter that an extraordinary record of transformation was made; physical stuff – skin, bones, lungs, pelvis – captured for a moment in studies from X-rays, inverted images and close-up details – undergoing relentless, inevitable, change into something other. A gossamer fine essence is felt at the heart of the mystery while the hardware that pins femur to hip stands out, harshly alien. Visceral, faithful, painful steps expose scars, stretch marks and rasheshonouring the unique journey this body had taken through its rich life, while an interweaving mutual inner journey of profound acceptancepresages a readiness for flight to greater freedom.Bernie’s drawings transfigure body into sacred landscape, intimating the numinousalthough quintessentially of the natural world. Through the generosity of their sharing we are reminded of our own mutability and offered glimpses of some essential belonging and grace.
Long after the visit I found myself thinking about these drawings and there meaning. It is a precious gift indeed for me to know that a mother-daughter relationship could be so intimate and generous. I saw that the one who gave life (and midwifed so many others) was honoured at the threshold of her own death. Midwifed by her family to another life, surely? The circle of life was complete. At Samain we honour the generations that have preceeded us. Our beautiful world springs anew from their dust, the earth beneath out feet sings back to us ancient lullabies as we dance on the bones.
Jacquie Burgess
Herbalist, psychotherapist,crystal healer and author