The Great Bear — Listening Piece
Naturally shed fallow deer antler, hand-carved with the Great Bear, stars and moon, and bound with brain-tanned fallow deer hide.
There is something about this piece that feels like creation.
Not creation as a single beginning, some distant moment when the world was made and then left to continue without us, but creation as something that is still happening.
Something ancient and ongoing.
A great turning in which stars become earth, earth becomes body, body returns to earth, and life rises again.
As I carved her, I kept seeing a bear who had wandered down from the stars.
A great old she-bear crossing that dark and unknowable distance between sky and earth, carrying something of the night with her. She comes down through moonlight and darkness, through the long dreaming of the world, until eventually she finds herself here,
amongst bone and soil, root and fur, human hands and animal bodies.
The Great Bear is one of our oldest companions in the night sky. Long before we illuminated our nights, humans looked upwards and made relationship with the darkness. We watched the stars move. We noticed their returning. We found animals amongst them. We found direction and season, story and mystery.
And somewhere in that great scattering of light, we found Bear, Ursa Major. The Great Bear walking endlessly around the northern sky.
There is something that moves me deeply about imagining those first people looking upwards and recognising an animal they knew upon the earth moving amongst the stars.
As though Bear belonged to both worlds. As though the boundary between earth and sky had never been as fixed as we imagined.
Perhaps this is why she has found her way here, onto antler. Because antler carries its own story of creation, death and return.
Each year the stag begins again.
From his living skull, antler pushes into being, bone growing with extraordinary speed, fed by blood and wrapped for a time in velvet. It branches outward like tree limbs, like roots reaching into another world, until eventually the velvet falls away and what remains is hard bone.
He carries it through the season, And then he lets it go because his body knows the old rhythm of release.
This antler was found after that letting go. Naturally shed by a fallow deer and returned to the land before eventually finding its way into my hands.
I have carved into the antler the Great Bear, the crescent moon and a scattering of stars, creating a small cosmology upon something that once grew from an animal body. She is bound with brain-tanned fallow deer hide, deer meeting deer again, one body held against another.
There is something almost impossible contained within that meeting : Star and bone, Bear and deer, Sky and earth, Life and death.
And the wild body and the human hand, all belonging to the same story.
Held within this Listening Piece is a whisper of the great mystery of being made.
Of how matter becomes body, how body becomes earth, how earth becomes root, leaf, blood, bone and breath.
How something can be carried for a while and then surrendered and how nothing in the living world seems to exist entirely by itself.
She reminds me ofthose moments when I look upwards into a dark sky and feel, however briefly, that strange recognition, that i have been here before, that I know this place.
That somewhere beneath everything i have built and named and separated, my body still remembers that my flesh is born from the same world as deer and bear, moon and soil.
The Great Bear feels like a piece for that remembering. A reminder that we belong to something immeasurably older than ourselves. That we are not standing outside the living world looking in, we are within it.
Animal bodies beneath a turning sky, Made from ancient matter.
And perhaps, somewhere above us, the Great Bear is still walking her ancient path around the northern sky.
And perhaps she has always been walking us home.
The Great Bear
•Naturally shed fallow deer antler.
•Hand-carved with the Great Bear, stars and moon.
•Bound with brain-tanned fallow deer hide.
•One of a kind.
£395 plus P&P
If she speaks to something ancient in you, perhaps she is yours.
The Great Bear — Listening Piece
Naturally shed fallow deer antler, hand-carved with the Great Bear, stars and moon, and bound with brain-tanned fallow deer hide.
There is something about this piece that feels like creation.
Not creation as a single beginning, some distant moment when the world was made and then left to continue without us, but creation as something that is still happening.
Something ancient and ongoing.
A great turning in which stars become earth, earth becomes body, body returns to earth, and life rises again.
As I carved her, I kept seeing a bear who had wandered down from the stars.
A great old she-bear crossing that dark and unknowable distance between sky and earth, carrying something of the night with her. She comes down through moonlight and darkness, through the long dreaming of the world, until eventually she finds herself here,
amongst bone and soil, root and fur, human hands and animal bodies.
The Great Bear is one of our oldest companions in the night sky. Long before we illuminated our nights, humans looked upwards and made relationship with the darkness. We watched the stars move. We noticed their returning. We found animals amongst them. We found direction and season, story and mystery.
And somewhere in that great scattering of light, we found Bear, Ursa Major. The Great Bear walking endlessly around the northern sky.
There is something that moves me deeply about imagining those first people looking upwards and recognising an animal they knew upon the earth moving amongst the stars.
As though Bear belonged to both worlds. As though the boundary between earth and sky had never been as fixed as we imagined.
Perhaps this is why she has found her way here, onto antler. Because antler carries its own story of creation, death and return.
Each year the stag begins again.
From his living skull, antler pushes into being, bone growing with extraordinary speed, fed by blood and wrapped for a time in velvet. It branches outward like tree limbs, like roots reaching into another world, until eventually the velvet falls away and what remains is hard bone.
He carries it through the season, And then he lets it go because his body knows the old rhythm of release.
This antler was found after that letting go. Naturally shed by a fallow deer and returned to the land before eventually finding its way into my hands.
I have carved into the antler the Great Bear, the crescent moon and a scattering of stars, creating a small cosmology upon something that once grew from an animal body. She is bound with brain-tanned fallow deer hide, deer meeting deer again, one body held against another.
There is something almost impossible contained within that meeting : Star and bone, Bear and deer, Sky and earth, Life and death.
And the wild body and the human hand, all belonging to the same story.
Held within this Listening Piece is a whisper of the great mystery of being made.
Of how matter becomes body, how body becomes earth, how earth becomes root, leaf, blood, bone and breath.
How something can be carried for a while and then surrendered and how nothing in the living world seems to exist entirely by itself.
She reminds me ofthose moments when I look upwards into a dark sky and feel, however briefly, that strange recognition, that i have been here before, that I know this place.
That somewhere beneath everything i have built and named and separated, my body still remembers that my flesh is born from the same world as deer and bear, moon and soil.
The Great Bear feels like a piece for that remembering. A reminder that we belong to something immeasurably older than ourselves. That we are not standing outside the living world looking in, we are within it.
Animal bodies beneath a turning sky, Made from ancient matter.
And perhaps, somewhere above us, the Great Bear is still walking her ancient path around the northern sky.
And perhaps she has always been walking us home.
The Great Bear
•Naturally shed fallow deer antler.
•Hand-carved with the Great Bear, stars and moon.
•Bound with brain-tanned fallow deer hide.
•One of a kind.
£395 plus P&P
If she speaks to something ancient in you, perhaps she is yours.
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