Joyce Ertel Hulbert: The CommonWheel Project

The CommonWheel Project: New and Recent Work

~Artist Reception: January 26, 2019, 3 pm – 5 pm~

The CommonWheel project has developed in part from my on-going study and attempt to assimilate the concept of the Kalachakra, or wheel/cycle of time, from Tibetan Buddhism. The series encompasses five large assemblage/ collage compositions, with multiple smaller works and journal documentation. The series is composed from drawn and digitally produced imagery, historic textiles and fabrics, and found objects, and is best installed as site-specific works including original wheels and circles both featured and represented in the work. I thank Commonweal for this opportunity to display the series and its offshoots in its entirety.

Practice in the Kalachakra tradition has two main external features—a ritual initiation of great complexity and a ritual meditation in the creation of a sand mandala. It is believed that to take this initiation or create its sand mandala is an act of efficacy towards world peace. In 2011 I traveled to Washington, DC, to attend and participate in His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s teaching of the Kalachakra Initiation. This experience was a jumping off point for CommonWheel. As a vehicle for exploring “cycles of time” found in the mandala form, as work which instills a meditational focus, I offer these works for contemplation to the Commonweal community, joining with HHDL’s belief in world peace.

Two additional series have been started since the completion of CommonWheel in 2014.

Bark I & II are explorations of the graphic quality of tree bark in relation to fabric panels I produce in the studio from contemplative “chance operation,” folding and wrapping, dipping in ink, dyes, or resists. When I choose to open a panel that I’ve been manipulating, the resultant patterns are “discoveries” that stimulate my senses and invite new compositional strategies.

Interstitial is a new series that is growing from contemplating the sky as I do my regular yoga practice outdoors. Based on a set of historic fishing nets, I am currently immersed in learning ways to represent these nets as networks. Thinking of how much we think, how so much our viewing of nature can have a veil of our perceiving, and grasping, and quantifying laid over it, my textile sensibilities and desire for expansiveness of mind are running side by side as this new series takes off. In the side gallery, I share initial drawings, etchings, and digital prints from Interstitial.

Joyce Ertel Hubert
510-318-1946
www.joyce-ertel-hulbert.com