Maura O’Connor

From a young age, a love of the outdoors, natural landscapes and the rhythms of day turning into night have been a preoccupation of mine. Whether at home or traveling: digging in the garden soil, planting trees or walking barefoot on sand and stone brings a deep sense of connection to the inner workings of nature and often finds its way into the encaustic, oil and mixed media paintings that make up a large part of my art practice.

The story of the The Bear, a different kind of cautionary tale where human-kind has survived but is in its last years of existence, dependent upon the natural world and the creatures within it to carry life forward, deeply resonates. Bears are remarkable creatures in Andrew Krivak’s novel. They and the trees of the forest contain the histories of life. They are both witness and helpers. This haunting story brings to mind Native American cosmology stories and other myths.

Winter Calendar is a two-panel oil encaustic painting that contains a timeline of events from my life, embedded in layers of wax, oil, paper and sand. The shape of a bearskin is split down the middle with a spiral map of numbers that refer to the years of my life, so far: 1965-2024. The work originated in concept from Pekka Hämäläinen’s, Lakota America and an image of Lone Dog winter count. The caption for the image explains, “Winter counts were originally drawn on buffalo hides and later on cloth, muslin and paper. Using ink and various pigments, the keepers of winter counts drew pictographs sequentially in spirals or rows, often covering more than a century in a single hide. Several times a year the keepers unrolled the calendars and retold the events, reinforcing the people’s historical memory; the winter counts were essentially mnemonic devices for collective remembering.”

The imagery and purpose of the Native American winter counts is very appealing to me as I enter the sixth decade of my life. Realizing that I’ve begun to forget some details of prior events and missed opportunities for passing along stories or information to next generations of my family, there is some nostalgia but also melancholy associated with the work. My aim was to review but also bring forward into my own consciousness the hidden aspects of my past– as far as I could perceive them. I chose the shape of a bearskin to contain the spiral of years of my life because of an unforgettable sighting of a mother Grizzly with her cubs during a trip to Glacier National Park, Montana, in my twenties. Mother and cubs were no more than several hundred yards away, but down a steep ravine. When she caught scent of us up on the ledge, she stood up on her hind legs to her full height and swayed her whole body back and forth in the breeze. She looked directly at us. It was a magnificent sight of the power of such an animal albeit from a safe distance– and one I’ve never forgotten.

The accompanying Winter Squall I and II, also oil encaustic works on panel, contain archival prints of two images shot within a few seconds of one another on the Garnet Trail in CT. The photographic images were taken as a winter storm abruptly arose in the woods which were docile one moment, a swirl of leaves and snow the next, blurring the trail in front of the dogs and myself on our afternoon walk. The prints and encaustic oil panels convey a similar sense of the passage of time, change and movement across a landscape– a kind of remembrance.

https://www.mauraoconnorcreative.com/