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"Eleanor
Spiess-Ferris An Artist's Journey," Estella Lauter
Fairly early in her artistic career (by 1979), Eleanor Spiess-Ferris began to do works in series. The first was a group of disembodied clothes beginning with Wild Sticks, in which the story of her Aunt Maggie's ride through the streets of Taos in a red dress on a white horse combined in the artist's imagination with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Maggie's red shoes became a sign of rebellious energy in many other paintings, such as Key Hole Dog (also 1979), where they are left behind in the mad dash away from a dog who generates a shadow and a fear far greater than his size warrants. In The Cold Room (1980), the smallest figure shows Aunt Maggie's spunk in trying to save a group of voluptuous tightrope "artists," who have failed to notice that their lines are unattached, by offering her own "back" in support.
In 1983-84, Eleanor Spiess-Ferris explored the hybrid in a new series featuring a woman's body with a swan's head. In Autumn Narrative (1984) this swan woman is frightened into immobility by the presence of not just one but several dogs (who turn out on closer inspection to be puppets). In the artist's only still life, Plastic Pears (also 1984), the swan is joined by hybrid crows, who will presumably settle the question of what's real with their testy beaks. Later, the swan in combination with other bodies or objects appears with clownlike figures and skulls (prefiguring the series on death), as, for example, in Parade (1987), where the swans are helping to bring in the moon, an image frequently associated with goddesses. Indeed, after establishing her goddess series, the artist makes that relationship explicit in Her New Image (1990), where two forms of the Goddess meet face to face. Voluptuous disembodied clothing, red shoes, a magical dog who enters through a keyhole, the swan in combination with various other beings, crows, the puppet, the clown, the skull, even the Goddess- all became part of the artist's "signature" during the mid-eighties, but the changing relationships among her "characters" showed no tendency toward any kind of conclusion, much less toward fusion.
Even in the midst of a series on death completed in 1988--where both The Puppet and the puppeteer are surely doomed, the Ark is loaded with undesirable species, and They Who Eat Birds seem determined to eat even the swan (forbidden by the Bible, probably because of its association with female shamanic power)--Eleanor Spiess-Ferris created one of her most hopeful images in The Egg. Farcical as the clown under water may seem, she holds the symbol of "the Creatress, whose World Egg contained the universe in embryo" (Walker, 1983, 270), thereby still representing the possibility of ecological survival. Likewise, the River Styx (site of the gouache called Water Fowl), where birds are privileged over human species, symbolizes birth as well as death by virtue of its association with the menstrual blood of Mother Earth (Walker, 1983, 959-60). Most of the other works in this series, however, suggest impending disaster: the birds being carried from their winter tomb in The Last Spring seem hopelessly endangered; the woman in Resignation is being devoured at both ends under the impotent surveillance of comic book cutouts that serve as human heads. In a poignant gouache called Solo (1989), crows "sing" their message to those insentient heads while the clown looks on and does nothing.
In her series concerning the Goddess, despite the artist's humor and vitality, her vision darkens. She shows the Crone (often known as Hecate or Hel) protecting her nest from Marauders (1989), who are figured as clowns. The Virgin Goddess, on the other hand, is discovered by callow Voyeurs (1989), also clowns. Indeed, many such clowns are on hand for the Goddess' Reception (1991). In the guise of the four seasons, she offers herself in marriage; her fate is left up to The Reluctant Groom (1991). While she waits for affirmation, the Goddess is forced to feign happiness (in Happy and the Key Hole Dog, 1990) while the water of life spills out of her cup and the robins turn to plastic.
Unlike others who have attempted to determine the outcome of such dramas of survival through art, Eleanor Spiess-Ferris offers us three possible resolutions (in the spirit of postmodernism), and places the responsibility on us to choose among them or imagine our own. She cannot resist the temptation to envision a happy ending in The Second Beginning (1991), but a smiling figure of Death makes the viewer think that a new Eden would mean simply another chance to repeat the same mistakes. In another scenario closer to the spirit of the surrounding work, the Goddess turns away from The Drowning Man (1991) in despair or disgust; the clown may save him, but it seems unlikely. In an extension of this vision, reminiscent of the Gaia Theory in contemporary science (Lovelock) where the universe keeps only the species that ensure its continuation, the Goddess and the artist deliver the birds to their coffin At Sea (1991). The Goddess survives, but the human species as we have known it may not. In a recent painting, the fertility goddess and her companion the hare (totem of Eostre, from whom come the name and rituals of rebirth associated with Easter) remain detached even through the Egg Eaters (1991) are devouring the forest. A third possibility, imagined before the others in Raft (1990), presents the severed head of the Goddess. Indeed, another goddess figure composed of flowers who might have served as a harbinger of better days seems likely to be eaten by Sharks (1991). The artist symbolizes her refusal to make up our minds for us by showing herself, naked but masked, riding the stick horse again, leading her cast of characters into/out of the woods in Night Walkers (1991).
In retrospect, perhaps all of Eleanor Spiess-Ferris' work to date has been about the possible loss of all recognizably sentient life. After all, she began with headless beings that looked human because of their clothes, but had no bodies and were highly susceptible to fear despite brief moments of rebellion or exertion. When heads appeared, they were the heads of swans or other birds, and later of goddesses rather than of human beings. For those who have not studied ancient goddess religions, wherein for 30,000 years, all human beings were regarded as children of the earth, and Mother Earth was personified with many names as the source of all wisdom and creative energy, the swan and the crow may provide useful keys to the artist's process of thought. In several cultures, from India and Siberia to Greece, Scandinavia, and Great Britain, the swan represents the power to gibe life and bring death. It appeared in Paleolithic cave paintings of women's bodies with the necks and beaks of swans (Johnson, 16); later it symbolized the Muses-- the Triple Goddess of "inspiration" (Walker, 1983, 701); it was the totem of Aphrodite or Venus--also known at different times as Moira or Fate, Asherah or Astarte, Mari (the Sea), Mary Isis and Ishtar (Walker, 1983,44-5). Likewise, the crow (along with the dog!) was often thought to be the death messenger of the Crone, but the Romans regarded it as a symbol of the future because its cry ("cras") means "tomorrow" (Walker, 1988,398). So even before Spiess-Ferris began to represent the Goddess directly in fully bodied forms, symbolic clues were present in her antidotes for the headlessness (lack of spiritual wisdom) and bodilessness (lack of physical integrity) in contemporary society. The Goddess was missing. Would that it were a pimple matter to restore her energy. By implication, if that energy (or wisdom based on understanding the world's body and its cycles) remains absent, humankind and even the Goddess herself (the earth / the universe / the generative energy of the fertilized egg) may vanish. Far from being a hopeful story about the transformation of female being from emptiness to fullness through various experiments in fusion, Spiess-Ferris' work, despite its comic overtones and vital images, is about an Apocalyps wherein everything, both good and evil, may be destroyed.
A small loophole exists, however, in the deliberate ambiguity of her visual language to preserve our power of choice. One of the oldest characters of world mythologies, the trickster is as various as the Goddess in its capacity to symbolize the energies of transformation. It can be the harbinger of cultural advancement or the utterly unconscious buffoon who could not recognize the signs of culture if his life depended on it. Always a shapeshifter, Trickster is often figured as rabbit, coyote, raven (cf. crow) or spider in Native America tales, but is perhaps best known in contemporary Western culture as a clown. The clown is the one in these paintings who discovers the Goddess, but also tries to steal her egg and probably fails to act in time to save the drowning man. Inadequate to the end, s/he nonetheless hangs in there as an enduring symbol of the will to survive. In this character lies both the hope and the dread of the artist's vision, but also much of the energy--the mystery--that makes these paintings memorable.
