Wynn Earl

I seek to build not walls but doorways….connections between people, between places. All who seek the doorway shall find it, find passage, and cherish the open gate, for one who enters returns anew.

As the temple burned I watched spiraling towers of smoke rain down a curtain of embers. I heard a woman crying say, “Look at all those spirits. Finally free.” I left items that belonged to a loved one in the temple, and the thought of him existing somewhere in some form was profoundly meaningful to me. The temple burn was an intensely spiritual moment and the thought of that experience and the shared sense of belonging that it gave us all inspired me to create this sculpture.

The elevated flat plane of the piece represents the intersection between good and evil, life and death, the natural and supernatural, our universe and those parallel. Below it is the Earthly realm and the narrow range of that which we can understand…It is punctuated by the vortex, a representation of the powerful physical forces that shape our universe and that which cannot be seen or understood. Light Years Away celebrates the vortex as a symbol of the cultural tradition of imbuing natural forces with folklore, mythology, ritual, and meaning as a way of connecting the world we understand with that which lies beyond. Across time and across cultures the vortex has been a source of spirituality and folklore. The Navaho called them chiindii, and believed they were the spirits of the deceased wandering across the landscape. In the Middle East they were the source of the genie myth. Tornados have been described as the finger of God. The vortex is not just an Earthly phenomenon but is a manifestation of the underlying forces that create all things. They exist in the spiraling arms of galaxies, in the swirling of ocean currents, in the accretion disc of an infant solar system, and surrounding the mysterious black hole.

Light Years Away is a piece intended to have many meanings to many people, united by our presence in this place at this time, in a reality that is light years away from the default world, having experiences that are light years away from the ordinary, meeting people that are light years away from the familiar, making gestures to gods and demons that exist in places light years away from this world. Through it we pay homage to these spirits, these worlds. We send our grief, desires and prayers into the universe as if through a doorway and through that connection to what is light years away we are brought closer together.