The African American Museum and Library of Oakland

 "Celebrating Our Own"

Lorraine Bonner

 
June, 2008

I would like to thank the African American Museum and Library of Oakland for providing this venue and the opportunity to present my work. I will talk for a few moments about domination and fractals and show how these concepts are expressed in my artwork. My goal is to increase the energy for planetary and personal peace and liberation.

We all know what domination is: it’s when somebody makes you do something against your will. I assert that, if you follow the trail back, all domination is based on violence, on the threat of pain. Domination is a form of trauma. A human being subjected to trauma suffers a kind of internal rupture.

What about fractals?  In mathematical terms, fractals are self-repeating structures, that is, if you examine them at any level, they will look the same. If you look at the mountain range on the horizon or the granite they are made of, you see the same jagged pattern. If you look at the branching and re-branching and re-branching of the blood vessels in your body, or of the veins of a leaf, you see the same pattern. This repetition from large to small scale is described as a fractal. Fractals are a part of all creation.

Domination may be described as a fractal also. The government bombs people in other countries, an individual person harms their own child. From large to small, the dynamic is the same.

I have used art to study domination, the normal human response to domination, and possible alternatives to domination. I think that one of the most important examples that we have of an alternative to domination is our own body. No part of the body dominates any other. Throughout the body, at every level, we see cooperation and interdependence. When domination occurs in the body, we call it cancer. We know it can be life-threatening.

Fractally speaking, we are innately cooperative beings. What occurs at the molecular level in our bodies, and occurs between the kidney and the liver and the brain and lungs, must also occur between individuals, between social organizations, between nations, between our species and our planet. 

When I began to study domination, I realized it begins very early in life. In my own case, these experiences were unusually intense, yet it is also the standard, textbook and kitchen table teaching of childrearing that adults are supposed to dominate and control children. Domination has a fragmenting effect on a person, whether a child or an adult. Much of my artwork deals with this fragmentation. For example, the piece “Crown of Brokenness” illustrates the broken and wounded parts within each of us, within our community, within our capitalism-dominated world, held within a context of wisdom, compassion, and healing power.

We are so accustomed to fragmenting our human world into the black and the white, occasionally nodding to the brown and red and yellow, yet what would a Martian anthropologist think of us? The piece, “The Great Divide” shows two human beings, made of the same clay, with minor differences of hair texture, nose and lip shapes, meeting each other across a seemingly insurmountable barrier, a great divide, that to you or me or a Martian anthropologist, looks like a chalk line, easily erased with a brush of the hand.

I admit that I am at times somewhat of a cynic about the whole concept of hope. Some of my internal fragments are pretty convinced that nothing will ever change, that domination is here to stay, and that instead of our social lives becoming more like our bodies, the cancer of domination will weaken our bodies and we will all die and take a lot of other species with us. So I was very surprised when the piece “Ready Or Not” took shape in my hands. Here were all these little guys peeping out, some from so deep inside I could hardly see them, some still fragmented and bound, kids tired of hiding for the long count, ready to be found, ready to come home, ready or not.

Our children represent so much potential for good, for change, for a new way to live together, in our families, in our community, in our world. They need us to be present for them, to believe in them, they need us to talk less and listen more, like brother George here.

We have to listen more to each other. We have to listen to our bodies, because there is not one word of fast food or soft drink advertising that our bodies agree with, and the so-called obesity epidemic is a sad illustration of how we are fragmented away from the wisdom of our bodies.

In closing, I would like to mention the two pieces together, “Daughter of Perpetration” and “Joyful Noise.” “Daughter of Perpetration” is part of a series exploring perpetration, which I define as any violation of the trust which we are born entitled to expect from one another. of a series exploring perpetration, which I define as any violation of the trust which we are born entitled to expect from one another.

There is a binder of images of other pieces in the series. “Daughter” is a kind of self-portrait of myself as a woman, a woman of color, and a survivor of childhood atrocities. Her fragments are fragmented, and her broken heart is a mirror in which one can see one’s own brokenness. To deny this brokenness only perpetuates and strengthens domination. To be willing to see it, to hold it with compassion and wisdom, is to bring closer the day of liberation and “Joyful Noise.”

Thank you.