Nancy Boyd: Bardo Song: Part 2

Opening reception: April 23, 2022: 2-5PM

Bardo: In Egyptian cosmology:

- a state of existence between death and rebirth, varying in length according to a person’s conduct in life and manner of, or age at, death.

Metaphorically, Bardo can describe times when our usual way of life becomes suspended, as, for example, during a period of illness.

As with much of my work in recent years, these pieces continue to address the mutable and the conditional in all things. But in these “Bardo Songs”, it was as though I had been stunned into being less inhibited. I surrendered to the unknown and to the sense of being suspended in a strange state of contemplation and possibilities, some dark and some full of light. While I never overtly tried to work in imagery that spoke directly about the pandemic, the pieces almost unavoidably allude to strong forces that were clearly on my mind. The pieces reflect that suspended, stressful, dissonant, conflicted, disrupted, in-between, out-of-normal-time/position we have been compelled to inhabit. The dark gestures, the unpredictable fluid media effects and the overwhelmed organic elements are all situated in this time of shifting ground. – Nancy Boyd