A Call Answered, you know, it's kind of a moment within the heroine's journey of submitting to the call.The narrative of the heroine's journey runs in parallel to my experience. All the work that I make is, in essence, experiential. It's how I've experienced my growth as an artist. It's a surrendering to a luminous other half. The figure represents the ego self—the self, the body—and Ebezina represents the spirit aspect, the soul. The two are halves of a whole.

This particular image speaks to surrendering, and the horse in the image—bowing, surrendering into the call. My pathway as an artist has very much felt like a calling, experienced in dreams, tensions in my vocational life, pursuing career paths, and being called back to the act of making, the interior aspect of self.

The water in the foreground has to be crossed, with a guardian spirit present (Ebezina). This takes place on the ground, in front of the community. On the left-hand side is the Kite (bird) symbolic of life—an answer, a saying yes to the call, officially, in front of the ritual participants. There's a celebration because there were times I denied the call. This is a yes.

The horse symbolizes libido, instinctual energy—the energy to go through with the journey. In another dream, the horse was dead on the floor. That work is part of a calling; the mother figure, the Great Mother, orients the heroine's vision to life, to new beginnings. Here, the horse is alive, the instinct and energy saying yes. The body, the ego, and instinct unify to propel the heroine forward.

The celebrants are specifically from my dad's funeral. I videoed the dancers; they came on day two, and it was a celebration of life. It's not necessarily traditional attire—it’s about the feeling of celebration, the flywheel, the energy of the moment. Being summoned is simultaneously a birth and death—the dying of the will. The participants are from this funeral rites context as well.