Primal Heart
Welcome to Primal Heart
Feel free to enter the yard for a closer look
Primal Heart was sculpted in Purchase, NY in 1995 and cast into bronze at the Shidoni Foundry in Santa Fe, NM in 2001. It has been on display in their outdoor gallery where two previous castings have been sold. Both of those are currently on display in private collections.
Primal Heart is a self portrait. Its an embodied representation of an aspect of me and its encounter with the culture in which I was born. Below you will find a detailed description of the meaning behind the sculpture. Exposing the meaning of a piece is a tricky thing. Some would say that it shouldn’t be done. That the piece should embody and express its own nature, speaking to each individual in a manner suitable to them regardless of the artists’ intent. Others would say that the intention of the artist is paramount and communication of its meaning is essential to the relationship between an artist and his audience. Personally, I fall somewhere in-between. I always hope that my sculptures embody meaning in a way that compels a viewer to come in close and engage the piece on its own terms. Yet the more personal the symbolism and the meaning of a piece is to me the less likely a viewer is to fully understand the depth of what I am trying to convey.
So, for those of you who want to know what the sculpture means to me, read on. For those of you who want the depth of your own being to provide you with the meaning it has for you, independent of what it means to me, you are free to stop here. In either case, if you enjoy the piece and wish for me the financial freedom to create new ones, I ask that you take the time to make a donation to my Studio Fund. Creating sculpture of this quality on this scale takes a great deal of resources and I could use all the help I can get. Thank you. I’m grateful you decided to stop by. Enjoy
To date, Human evolution spans 8 million years. Human civilization on the other hand, a development made possible by the advent of agriculture, is only 12,000 years old. So, for 99.85% of our existence as a species, humans survived by gathering plants and killing animals for food. The intelligence that allowed us to live this way is the integration of a deeply intimate, full-body sensuality, a sharply honed discriminating awareness and raw, instinctual power. And because it was our very nature to be this way, we lived it completely.
Very few humans still live this way. Most of us live in modern cultures that no longer require us to kill for food. Our religions, philosophies and psychologies actually contrast our existence with those of animals as if we are well beyond their way of existing. With good reason. Yet we are still born with the same primate bodies that love to fully engage and sensually merge with the life of the world. I didn’t understand this when I was young. I didn’t fully appreciate the significance of what I was as a being and how my most intimate experience conflicted with the culture that was raising me.
When I was a kid I use to play in a swampy pond behind my house. I loved the mud and the deep murky water. I loved the frogs and their mounds of jellied eggs filled with tadpoles. I loved the snakes and the turtles and the dragonfly larva that crawled along the bottom of the pond like lobsters. I loved it so much that I brought them all home with me. I felt a powerful drive, an ecstatic impulse to bring the beings I found back to my people. The drive was full of passion and meaning. But my mother didn’t love these treasures like I did. And it seemed to me she didn’t love the way I was being when I loved them either. And I didn’t know why. I didn’t even know why I loved them. All I knew was this ecstatic feeling, this full-bodied, sensual involvement with life and the fact that my muddy little body and all the “filthy” critters I found apparently “belonged outside”. Thats what all the screaming was about. My living treasures were ugly for some reason and unwanted. Their way of being, my animality, wasn’t allowed in the house.
It wasn’t until I was midway through my twenties that I realized what I was doing in the pond with the animals was hunting. It was during that time that I made what I consider my first genuinely spiritual discovery. I realized that I am, in fact, an animal. At least one whole dimension of me is. It seems really funny to say that now because its so obviously true and fundamental about my life. But the fact is, up until then, my view of myself didn’t include that truth. My culture had told me that as a Human Being I was something altogether different and I believed them. It took me twenty years to realize the problem this created for me.
I was born an animal. But my culture didn’t want me to be an animal so they pretended that I wasn’t. They ignored that part of me and required me to hide it. Back in the day, my instinct to wander into the woods to find food would have been actively supported. My love of the mud and the smells of the plants, the intensity of my focused awareness and the intelligence in my strategies as a hunter would have been honed by the wisdom of elders. The depth of my immersion in life and the skills it produced would have been my greatest gift to my community.
But the tribe I was born into didn’t know these things for themselves and couldn’t see them for what they were. They only saw a boy who likes to make a mess. So I learned that this side of me had to be kept “outside”. But over the years, the “inside” kept getting bigger. My house turned into my house plus my school. Then my church. Then my town and the civilized human world of work and entertainment. The only “outside” left was way out of view in a new place I created… “the hidden”.
As the animal part of me fully matured I realized something completely natural from its point of view but completely unacceptable to my world. I was capable of violence. I realized that I had the mental, physical and emotional capacity to dominate other beings and kill them if I wanted to. This realization brought a shame to my experience of being a man that I couldn’t name for a very long time. A shame I suspect I share with other men in my culture. The fact that I didn’t and don’t actually want to kill or dominate other beings made no difference at all. Just knowing I had the capacity was damning enough from within. “Thou Shalt Not” seemed to cover just being aware of the feeling. So, I had to hide it from the world and myself.
For millions of years of human history a man’s capacity for violence was one of his primary ways of caring for those he loved. His sensual involvement in the act of tracking, attacking, killing, gutting and dismembering was synonymous with his love of life and one of his most skillful ways of caring for those he loved. His ability to be this way was not only natural to him, it was the part of him that kept those he loved alive. In his heart there was no conflict between the two. In the modern world, that part of him isn’t even wanted. But its still there in all of us and needs to be seen and understood in order to evolve.
This feeling capacity that embraces the conflicting realities of intimacy, love and life, violence, suffering and death without any contradiction is what I refer to as Primal Heart. As a boy I knew it but didn’t understand. As a young man I understood it but no longer experienced it fully. As a mature Human Being I can now embody it and use its unique intelligence in service to others with wisdom and power instead of violence. Just like it was intended.
Now that you know the meaning that gave rise to Primal Heart, I’ll leave the two of you alone. But I have to wonder. Can you find the meaning in the piece? Can you feel what I’m saying with the frog, for instance, or the heart in his back hand? Why is he up on a pedestal and where in the world is he looking? I really hope you take the time to find out for yourself. If you do try and you enjoy the exploration then I will consider Primal Heart a success. Thanks again for coming. Jeff