THE LANGUAGE
OF ROCK
AND STONE
THE VISUAL HEALING LIBRARY
THE LANGUAGE OF ROCK AND STONE
My family name is Clough.
Somehow my last name never seemed to go with my other names - Suzette Elizabeth Annis - names that were given in memory of both my grandmothers who died before I was born.
In Old English Clough means a cleft between two valleys - a ravine carved between two sides of land - an opening where something - light, water can pass through.
In Irish Gaelic - Clough means cloch - a stone or rock.
For most of my life I have struggled with my last name. It sat awkwardly in my mouth. Contemporary English made it sound ungainly - somewhere between a cough and something worse. I did not feel it was my name.
Then I found its etymological root.
Clough is a name of place that locates my ancestors in a part of Yorkshire where carboniferous limestone ravines - cloughs were formed around 330 million years ago as well as the ancient rockfields of Ireland.
Clough is not just an oddly sounding word but a geography of place that earlier peoples noticed to be distinct from other places - it holds a belonging to particular rock outcroppings, ancient formations of pressure and creation - naming the land itself.
I understood something that was not present when I said my uncomfortable last name at school roll calls or spelt my name over the telephone - that I can trace my ancestors to places where stones and rocks are living maps that locate people in relation to the land.
These rocks are from my homeland - Australia. These rocks live in my soul like standing stones voicing solidarity, recognition, coherence. My heart breaks open with red ochre. All the photos of single rocks, outcroppings and the Great Mother Rock - Uluru - and her sisters The Olgas - were taken in Central Australia.
I grew up in Sydney. We lived above my parents grocery shop on the corner of a busy road and a dead end street called Mary Street. At the bottom of our street were acres and acres of bush where rock wallabies, bandicoots, possums, kookaburras, redback spiders and plenty of snakes lived alongside a small creek humming with yabbies and tiny fish that were too small to catch.
At the edge of the creek was the Giantess - a sandstone boulder. The gang - my younger brother Sandy, Saxon, Duncan, Sally, Weenie - would climb the rock to get a better look at our country above the canopy of tall eucalyptus gums. I could not climb the rock.
I could look at it or run my hands along the rough grain of sandstone. But something in me felt - this stone was holding something I could not clamber over - a presence way too big, way too scary - way too full of what I had no language for. I did not know then that I was already learning the holy language of rock and stone.
I come to the sentence I often repeat inside myself: Painting is my way of knowing Earth...
Photos above and below: Angkerle Atwatye (Standley Chasm), located on Arrernte land in the Northern Territory, Australia - owned and managed by the Iwupataka Land Trust.
Stone does not speak in the language of speed.
Within its body it contains the imprint of fire, of pressure, of water, of deep time - all of it compressed into a materiality that is full with The Long Story of Anima Mundi - the long story of world soul.
When I press my hand into rock I feel this. A communication that thrums below spoken language into my own body as physical + psychical transmission.
Below: Stone Gods at the edge of the world - Lands End - Cornwall UK
The first section of this book is witness to the immense potent beauty of stones and rocks from all over the world - the second part (from here onwards) are a mix of paintings and photographs that record the transmission of earth, stone, fire and water.
The focus of my paintings over many decades has been to let the voices from these dimensions speak through paint and the listening surface of the paper and canvas...
Coastal rocks - Cornwall - UK
THE MOTHER STONE SPEAKS - tissue paper, canvas, inks, beeswax, tracing paper, paper towel, acrylics + pigment dust... and HER VOICE
THE VISUAL HEALING LIBRARY is a collection of contemporary illuminated manuscripts created by Suzette Clough.
Written in the immersive language of images - they are forged in the alchemical lineage of artists as healers and storytellers of the Soul.
I hope The Library can become a sanctuary that allows you to dive deeper into the Original visual energy patterns that underpin the body of Earth which can hold us steady in these times of immense upheaval and dismantling.
I would love to hear from you.
If you love this work and would like to support it in expanding - please send a link for The Library to a friend or become a paid member yourself.
Thank you so much!
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