Information:

Painted in 2022, later assigned Design index number 003 for the studio records, titled the Solar Disc Mandala.

Photoshop and Wacom Cintiq/Stylus

Artist Statement:

The Solar Disc Mandala was my way of starting with the universal symbols present in all ancient civilizations and pre-historic peoples. The source of all life and all energy for us here on earth, it's a primal disc of fire and light. It became for me a symbol of the new day shining on the Find Center series of Mandalas, as well as a tribute to my training in ceramics with the different color temperatures achieved in the kiln where clay is transformed into ceramic.   

Studio Notes for Catalog:

All terrestrial life traces its existence to Sol. The observed path of the sun across the sky gave humanity our earliest framework for reckoning time and cycles, making the solar disc one of our oldest shared symbols.

I did not fully realize how deeply the circle dominated my own visual alphabet until I looked back across decades of studio work. In my fifth year at university, an elective in wheel-thrown ceramics altered the trajectory of my practice. The hypnotic discipline of centering wet clay on a spinning wheel forged an enduring fascination with rotational form. Later, during years spent practicing British Traditional Wicca, that same formal geometry returned through the ritual marking of sacred space in the round.

When the Mandala series began in earnest following the end of a twenty-year marriage, returning to the solar disc was both an aesthetic instinct and a personal necessity. I needed a subject that embodied a literal and figurative dawn.

Rather than relying on generic sunny yellows, I reached back to the memories of late-night kiln firings. Anyone who has peered through a peephole into a firing chamber knows that peak heat stops looking like fire and starts looking like pure, transmutational energy. The flames give way to incandescent blue-whites, deep violet-pinks, and chemical flashes of copper and iron glazes.

That high-fire palette became the engine for the Solar Disc Mandala. It represents the first time the thesis of Hidden Light appeared intentionally in my catalogue: the quiet source of illumination that only becomes visible when matter enters the crucible. And yields to transformation..