RIDING THE OX, 2011
In Zen Buddhism, the Ox Herding Series is traditionally attributed to Kakuan, a twelfth century Chinese Zen master. He made a sequence of ink paintings with poems to help his students understand the stages of the path of enlightenment, the spiritual journey to discover one's True Self.
Using the metaphor of an ox herder who has lost her ox, her most valuable possession, she must travel great distances, through brambles and forests, deep into the mountains, to find this wayward ox and somehow bring her home. With this series of sculptures I have transformed the two-dimensional paintings to three dimensions, and made the ox herder a woman. I also added my own poems and comments about what I have discovered thus far on my own spiritual journey.
Please also visit Riding the Ox, 2011 in the Artist Books section for a printed version of this series.
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