TILKE ELKINS

STATEMENT

The living world surges with a network of intuitive messages that move continuously between all matter and beings: between molecules, plants, animals, wind, stars and galaxies. These are messages transmitted and received through a kind of telepathy, an inner knowing, undetectable by human machines, devices or rational systems. Intuitive messages travel through time and space in all directions, flowing easily between past, present, and future, carrying feeling, carrying information, saying hello, tuning the vibrations -– the music -– that holds life together.

Intuition is diffuse. Intuition does not follow a single pathway, but spreads through the complex web of life like water, fanning out and wicking into many places at once. Intuition is, in its way, as delicate as love: grasp at it, look for quantifiable proof, and it disperses. Love is, in fact, crucial to intuition. Love is the conduit through which intuition rides and travels. Love is connection. Feelings of love and connection are feelings of kinship, of family, and it turns out that the knowing of other beings as family, as kin, is what invites intuitive exchanges of wisdom, information, and knowledge.

Love is the recognition of mutual existing, mutual agency that activates such exchanges. These exchanges happen not just between entities identified as 'species,' but between life in all its expressions, from the most minute to the limitlessly vast, where selfhood shifts from atoms to individuals to landscapes to galaxies, each with its own distinct membrane and independent capacities for communication. The term "inter-beings," introduced here, is useful, referring to any collection of beings of any type – animal, botanical, mineral, elemental, atomic, ecological, astral, cosmic and spirit.

Love between beings opens the door to the possibility of a shared dialog, and dialog increases the possibility for an exchange of love. This presents a cause-and-effect circularity where if love is present, communication is more likely, and if communication is present, love is easier to confirm. The opposite is also true: in the absence of communication, or love, the occurrence of either is less likely.

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I make art to be with, to enter the slipstream of dialog going on everywhere always. Through being with, I feel connected, in-relationship with all life. Art is the context in humancentric culture where intuition, embodiment and emotions, called “creativity,” are profitable, and so, made room for. And so kinship sneaks disguised into the humancentric world as art. ‘Ceremonied art’ is the term I’ve invoked to describe art which affirms all life as family through being with and communicating — intuitively and other wise. This communication, this being with, is a ceremony. To affirm life as family is to ceremony.

To affirm all life as family is to affirm all humans as family. Ceremonied art is art that looks directly at the severed places between humans and humans, and humans and inter-beings, and seeks healing, repair and connection. For more on ceremonied art, please go here.

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