Ritual and pilgrimage reflect the spiritual in art
private prayers... public rituals
express love for the world

The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande is a seven-year performance I began in 1987… my heart calling to speak and act through the intention/attention-filled gestures of ritual… Once a month, I walked the river's bed and banks doing a literal and symbolic cleansing… the deep-listening portion as important as the collection of found objects, which recorded the event and were shown in installations…

A journal, "Riveries," chronicled my song as an earth heartist… my awe at the earth's all-encompassing artistry… While the Great Cleansing served as Earth Initiation, I opened the door to the magic of intention with Forgiveness, Key to Peace, a one-week working/living/sleeping performance in the storefront window of Sohozat, West Broadway in New York City.

My performances are pilgrimages. Their themes arise from a constant dialogue between my experiences and my conscious understanding of these experiences; they also evolve organically. In 1993, the river, too full from spring runoffs, 'sends' me on The Road of Meeting to North Carolina-a one-month journey to meet and honor environmentalists... an invitation to see one another as "earth colleagues"… a pilgrimage where meeting (listening) and finding commonality are sacred acts.

The next participatory works rose out of a dark personal period, which left me with the realization that the earth was my most important relationship.The Most Precious Jewel, a pilgrimage begun in 1998, invites participants to re-member how precious the Earth is. To concretize that remembrance, I invite them to stitch beads on their favorite place on a fabric globe. Beads, like the rosary or the malah, are prayers. They also symbolize tears. Tears of joy. Tears of grief. Also, perhaps, gestures. Gesture already taken, or considered for Earth's sake.

The Point of Tears, a performance connecting participants to a deep listening to the heart, has taken me twice to Colombia and once to Russia in the years 2001-2003. Works like The Temple of the Heart and The Last Performance Project are pieces of "conceptual heart," the latter illustrating my quest to understand and confront my own death. They reflect how art can inform life; how art comes naturally to a life lived in awareness.

There was a time when public art meant a bronzed war hero on the plaza.
Today, it means something radically different. Today it is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the living and the dead face-to-face for all eternity. Now it is ceremonial art, collective art, political art, environmental art. It is new-genre public art, the artist as aesthetician and activist exploring her aliveness on the streets of her community.— Eric Maisel, Affirmations for Artists

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