Sarah Norton*
Medium: Colored Pencil on black construction paper
Date Created: December 7, 2008
Done as an active imagination exercise to "continue" the dream that I had on November 5, 2008:
The Fallen Child
I am visiting some sort of amusement park/hotel when up at the front desk I see a group of Japanese tourists come to check in and basically drop their little girl with the lady at the booth and walk away. She starts to follow them and almost loses sight but sees where they take a sharp right turn behind some big planters. She and I follow with her pushing the child in its high chair stroller (wooden and old fashioned).
I follow along. At some point I had been talking with this young woman, we exchange glances about how glibly the parents dropped this child with her. I am at first a good ways behind, watching as she runs the child down a tiny flight of stairs instead of taking a ramp...it make me a bit nervous but it turns out fine. They continue down this concrete sidewalk that is lined with trees, like a botanical garden--almost a rainforest area, where I can only assume the parents went too.
The child is getting irritated and the woman tries giving her her bottle (sort of like a tall sippy cup) which she throws. I go and pick it up, it seems to have some kind of very thick chocolate milk in it. Then she tries out the pacifier which doesn't work. At some point the bottle gets thrown again and as my back is turned I am seeing from someone else’s eyes as this child slips from its highchair and right down a flight of stairs headfirst! However at the bottom of the stairs she is fine. The woman and I are both laughing, relieved and amazed, and myself out of sheer nerves.
She gets the child back in the highchair again and we continue on when somehow she is out of her seat again and I see her headed for the top of another flight of stairs, I feel like I'm going to lunge to try to grab her because she is sort of slowing down. But as she reaches the edge, suddenly she trips and goes hurtling sideways, like a rag-doll, down the steps to this sort of screened in wooden viewing platform at the bottom. She lands on her back and is struggling to get up.(At this point she is a little Caucasian child with light brown hair, not Japanese anymore.)
I see her as though I am right next to her. At first it looks like she is not moving at all then I see the bone in her right arm is split in half. I can see the bone pushing, stretching inside her skin like the bones within a bats wing. At first I actually think her shoulder is disconnected but then you can see the break is farther down. I realize I have been watching her for too long and she really shouldn't be moving like that so I go flying down the stairs to her to see the extent of the injury and make her stop moving. When I get down to her I can see when she lifts up her body, the back of her shoulder is just bleeding slightly but very thin, white bones that almost look like a snakes ribs, or bird bones are protruding out all over.
It is extremely disturbing and I say to her that she must be still. Instead of the resistance I am expecting, she seems to calm down and says "okay." I am lying there on the floor with her, partly on top of her, still seeing those bones.
Title of Work: The Ornamental Tree
Medium: Acrylic paint, colored pencil, wood, glass, antique key, and Korean coins on wood
Date Created: March 1, 2009
inspired by a dream I had on Tuesday Feb 17, 2009, this is just the relevant excerpt:
The Skeleton Key
...I am with the TV character Bones trying to solve a case having to do with an Asian Gang. Bones and I, and some guy are running from someone up to this huge bare old oak tree. We know that it is the key to solving something, but I’m not exactly sure what. It has hundreds of Mercury glass ornaments hanging from it. We figure out that the idea is to knock them down, so we start to shake the branches to get them down. They are crashing all around us, I hear them falling everywhere and see all the colors of the metallic shards all over the ground. Finally there are only a few left in the tree but one in particular seems bigger than the others, it is red and shaped sort of like a top, we both decide that is the one. Bones gets on the guys shoulders and then we are taking the ornament down and I shake it. We can hear something rattle inside very faintly, my first thought is that it is going to be a smallish antique key, like for a journal or old cabinet drawer. However, when we crack the ornament open these coins come tumbling out into my hands. They are hexagonal and octagonal shaped and say "I - Ching " on them I try to count them but the number seems to keep changing from 4 at first to 6 to 8 and then back and forth b/w 6 and 8 a few more times before I finally ended with 6: 4 are alike and 2 are unique coins...
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