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Reprinted from The Arts in Psychotherapy,
Volume 28, Kate T. Donohue, Ph.D.,
REAT, "A transcendent journey through
the motherline: a voyage with Helen Hardin,
southwest artist," 19-30, 2001, with
permission from Elsevier Science.
"The artist appeals to that part of our
being...which is a gift and not an acquisition
and therefore is more permanently enduring"
(Joseph Conrad in Hyde, 1979, p. XI).
Introduction
The artist gives us a gift of her personal
images, which can be a bridge to our own
personal experience and a portal to archetypal
symbols. Ten years ago, I had an extraordinary
experience of discovering the artistic work
of the Southwest artist Helen Hardin. At
that moment, little did I know that her
work and her life story would open me to
my own experience in a fuller, and deeper
way, but would also help many other women
with whom I have worked discover their own
richly layered and complex Motherline stories.
My first glimpse of Helen Hardin's creative
process was through her image Visions
of Heavenly Flight (see Figure1) which
I had discovered serendipitously at the
Institute of
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Fig. 1. Visions of
Heavenly Flight (1977), Courtesy of
the Helen Hardin Estate Gallery.
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American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
I could not stop looking at this piece and
would come back to it several times in that
afternoon. What was my attraction? I had
always loved the Hopi and Pueblo myth of
the eagle as the sacred guardian of the
sky, the one who has direct access to the
sun Kachina, universal harmony, and the
creator. Through the feathers of the eagle
the desires of the humans reach the ears
of the Infinite (Parsons, 1939 & 1994; Spinden,
1976; Tyler, 1964). But this eagle was not
a traditional Native American eagle. Helen's
eagle was more modern, abstract, stark and
dramatic. Yet, it still conveyed the myth
of the eagle as the sacred guardian of the
sky. With this piece I started to understand
the paradox that each of Helen's images
held. One was simultaneously invited into
a familiar modern world with the abstract
design and then into an unfamiliar ancient
world of the Tewa mythos. Her paradox was
also one of precisely conveying modern chaos
and an ancient spiritual order with passionate
color and composition. With her paradox,
precision and passion, Helen made the ancient
Pueblo myth modern (Donohue, 1995).
My desire to know more about this artist
lead to a penetrating investigation of Hardin's
individuation process as a creative personality
(Jung, 1954, 1961, 1964, 1968; Neuman, 1959)
and into a profound exploration of her feminine
legacy: personally, culturally, creatively
and spiritually, the Motherline (Lowinsky,
1992). Jung's (1964) definition of individuation
is very different than the ego psychologists
and thus much more intriguing in understanding
the journey and images of the artist. For
Jung (1964), individuation is the process
of becoming whole and of the discovery of
the personal aspects of the self and the
archetypal aspects of the larger Self. A
person experiences herself/himself as unique,
yet common and linked to others through
archetypes and the collective unconscious.
This paradox ignites the individuation process
and can be revealed through personal images
and archetypal symbols.
To fully grasp one's potential self, a
woman must also journey through the Motherline
(Lowinsky, 1992), the biological, historical
and unconscious
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Figure 2. Changing
Woman (1981), Courtesy of the Helen
Hardin Estate Gallery.
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Figure 3. Medicine
Woman (1982), Courtesy of the Helen
Hardin Estate Gallery.
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Figure 4. Listening
Woman (1983), Courtesy of the Helen
Hardin Estate Gallery.
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feminine legacy passed on from mother to
daughter to granddaughter and to great granddaughter.
Naomi Lowinsky (1992), who coined the concept
of the "Motherline" , said we discover this
lineage through the stories of women's bodies,
women's' culture, women's history and women's
images. It is through the sharing of these
Motherline stories that women help each
other discover their full potential, thus
reconnecting to their bodies, themselves,
and feminine archetypes of Mother (Hansen,
1997; Neuman, 1963).
The life and transcendent images of bicultural
Southwest Artist Helen Hardin is a story
a creative women's journey of individuation
though the Motherline. Her story helps us
understand the personal, historical, cultural,
creative and spiritual paradoxes that mold
our life experiences. Hardin's images bridge
these paradoxes and open her to the power
of the transcendent function. By contrasting
her early childhood development to her adult
behavior, her compensatory function is revealed.
Through her images, she formed relationship
to her shadow, her animus and to the sacred.
Her Motherline legacy led her to numinous
experiences and transcendent Tewa and universal
images of the feminine. She called these
images her Women Series, her feminine
trinity: Changing Woman, Medicine Woman
and Listening Woman (see Figures
2, 3, and 4). They combine universal themes
and Tewa spiritual legends. With these images,
Helen Hardin molds the mythology of her
grandmother, Marianta Velarde, her mother,
Pablita Velarde and the future mythology
of her daughter, Margarete Bagshaw-Tindel
into her own unique mythology of the universal
mother.
The personal paradox of the motherline
Helen Hardin was born into an extremely
paradoxical world. She experienced personal,
maternal, cultural, and spiritual dualities
in her family. Her parents were from two
very different external cultures and internal
worlds. Herbert Hardin was from the Anglo-American
world and the logos world of the law, politics
and government work. Pablita Velarde, a
descendent of the Pueblo People, Tewa Nation
of New Mexico found her life's work as a
painter and surrounded herself with visual
images and her Tewa spiritual world. The
Hardin's had two children: Helen and Herby
(H. Hardin, personal communication, August
5, 1995).
In a childhood drawing (see Figure 5),
Helen reveals the effects of this parental
paradox. Created in profile, there are two
very distinct sides. On one side are the
men of the family. The father is to the
far left facing the center with his small
son in front of him. Both are smiling and
have their arms extending towards another
family member. On the other side in the
center right is the mother, smiling and
extending her arms out to embrace the son.
Behind her is a little girl (Helen) with
a down cast face, sad eyes, dragging her
doll on the floor. No one is extending an
embrace to her. This childhood drawing depicts
the emotional tone and shadow aspects of
this personal paradox for Helen; one of
sadness, distance from the mother that is
turned inward on the self. Pablita had a
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Figure 5. Untitled,
childhood drawing, Courtesy of the
Helen Hardin Estate Gallery.
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profound effect on her daughter's sense
of self, creativity and community and spirituality.
Helen's childhood was a mixture of two very
different parents from two very distinct
worlds and deep sadness in relationship
to the mother.
This intense sense of sadness started with
Pablita's tragic experience of the Motherline.
She was the daughter of Herman and Marianta
Velarde, (born in 1918). Marianta died when
Pablita was only six years old. By 1921,
she had lost her mother and her three brothers.
These losses were devastating for the young
Pablita. Herman, her father remarried and
virtually abandoned his children by sending
them to St. Catherine's Indian School in
Santa Fe about sixty miles from their home
at the Santa Clara Pueblo. Pablita told
stories of being beaten for speaking her
native Tewa instead of English, a common
experience for many Pueblo children (Hyer,
1993). The legacy of Pablita's motherline
was one of the wounded feminine due the
early loss of both her mother and the mother-culture.
This tragic loss was the portal for Pablita's
discovery of her artistic ability as a painter.
After the religious school, she transferred
to the Santa Fe Indian School, which was
undergoing a metamorphosis. SFIS became
a national center for Indian art and Pablita
found her life work as painter. This incredible
gift became a source of pain in her culture.
Painting was not considered
woman's work in my time. A Woman was supposed
to just be a woman, like a housewife and
mother and chief cook. Those were the
things I wasn't interested in (Hyer, 1993.
p.1).
Pablita was censored by the Tewa elders,
but continued to pursue art in spite of
the criticism. She became an imagistic chronicler
of the ancient stories of the Pueblo, especially
the one of Turkey Girl.
Like Pablita herself,
Turkey Girl was an orphan. Her cruel foster
mother made her herd turkeys all day and
kept her from the social life of the village.
But the
kindly turkeys dressed her for the ceremonial
dance, the villagers saw that she was
very beautiful. Fearing witchcraft, the
men of the village tried to kill Turkey
Girl, but she was saved by a weird, beautiful
turkey wing that rose from the rocks,
giving her and her flock time to enter
a sacred cave and disappear forever (Hyer,
1993, p. 3).
Creatively, Pablita did not disappear.
She pursued her art and added the duties
of motherhood after she married Herbert
Hardin in 1941. Attending to both roles
was a constant conflict for Pablita, which
resulted in another struggle with alcoholism.
At times, she did try to disappear into
the spirits of alcohol. Her art at this
time, especially Communicating with the
Full Moon (1962) depicts her suffering
and loss of self during this time. (Hyer,
1993, p.17)
Pablita's ambition and alcoholism had a
profound influence on her family life and
marriage. The Hardin's divorced when Helen
was thirteen. This was devastating for Helen
for she feared she would lose the parent
who understood and protected her. Herbert
was the idealized parent in this family
who suffered with the struggle with alcoholism.
(H. Hardin, personal communication, August
5, 1994; Scott, 1989)
Helen in her early years was forced to
deal with the dual nature of her mother.
She could be the loving sober and nurturing
Pablita, the storyteller and artist. Then
unpredictably, she could become the monstrous
intoxicated mother who could also be very
abusive towards Helen. This paradox in the
personal motherline shaped her shadow sense
of family itself as revealed in the childhood
drawing, gave her inspiration to find the
feminine spirit in her native Tewa myths
and created her internal paradox, which
Helen would depict in her paintings.
The cultural and spiritual paradox of
the motherline
Helen's personal paradoxes were interwoven
with deep cultural and spiritual dualities.
Being raised in two distinct cultures, Helen
had two languages, two names, two spiritual
practices and two worldviews. Helen spoke
only Tewa during the first five years of
her life. The Tewa language is very different
from English. It is more rich, expansive
and imagistic as well as is directly linked
to a spiritual nature. Tewa delineates fifteen
states of time versus English, which has
only three: past, present and future. The
Tewa world is dualistic. They recognize
the social and symbolic aspects of all elements
of life. There are three human and three
supernatural aspects to existence. "In the
life cycle of an individual this tribal
journey is symbolically enacted from birth
to death. At death, the soul of each human
category becomes the spirit of its linked
supernatural category" (Ortiz, 1969, p.
xiii). Thought and action in the Tewa world
is organized around these dualities. (Ortiz,
1969; Ryder, 1986) The Tewa language reflects
the Tewa Pueblo religious life. It is
...one of instrumentalism
controlling the natural through the supernatural,
usually, of course, from a flow of interest,
not a planned enterprise. The technique
of control is largely magical, that is,
ritual acts are automatically effectual:
or song or dance, color or line are formalistic
or compulsive: but there is more here
than magic---there is conceptual control
(Parsons, 1939, p. xxxii).
The Tewa world was one full of spiritual
and cultural paradox. It is compulsive,
yet not planned. It is natural and supernatural.
Helen's early world revolved around these
spiritual and cultural dualities and added
another thick fiber to her internal tapestry
of personal and maternal paradoxes.
Hardin had two names Tsa-sah-wee-eh, which
means "Little Standing Spruce" , and Helen,
which she only used after the age of six
years old. Hardin signed her works as Tsa-sah-wee-eh,
rarely as Helen Hardin. She felt the creative
source of her imagery was fueled by the
expansive, imagistic, spiritual language
and culture of the Tewa world.
In addition to the dualistic nature of
the Tewa world, Helen and her brother Herby
were raised in two religious traditions:
Tewa and Roman Catholic. Helen and her brother
talked about their home being filled with
Tewa and Roman Catholic icons and they were
trained in both traditions. Yet, Helen never
painted Christian images. Tewa alone was
the source of her spiritual inspiration
for her creative work. Tsa-sah-wee-eh felt
closely connected to the universality, logic,
natural and mystical elements of the Tewa
spiritual world. Living between these two
worlds, she felt a kinship with the Kachinas
who moved between heaven and earth.
Although Helen had a deep internal connection
to the Tewa world, she was considered a
"half-breed" in the Pueblo, In the 1940's
though the 60's, children of mixed blood
where called this in both the Anglo and
Tewa worlds. The Pueblo elders forbade inter-racial
marriages for many reasons, one being protection.
This sense of marginality created a tremendous
loss for Helen. She was not allowed to dance
with her Tribe. This is a devastating loss
for a member of a Pueblo/Tribe. In the dance,
one takes their place in the community,
in its history, in its spiritual life and
through this, finds a soul place in themselves.
(Fergusson, 1931).
Like her mother, Pablita, Helen was censored
for her creative work. In the 60's, a woman
could paint, but she could not reveal tribal
secrets to non-Tewa people. Despite the
abstract and modern nature of images, the
elders felt she revealed tribal spiritual
secrets with her creative work. Her deep
intuitive understanding of the spiritual
nature of the Kachinas let her brush dance
on the canvas and paint the essence of the
Tewa spirit world. Without intention to
cause harm, nevertheless, she was censored
for her creative work. Protection of tradition
fueled the elders and intuition fueled Helen.
In the outer world, they seemed at odds.
Local legend has it that the elders actually
said that Helen would die young for violating
this taboo. When Helen did die at the age
of 41 years from beast cancer, Pablita,
devastated, thought the prophecy had been
fulfilled. Helen's profound connection to
and rejection by the Tewa world would be
the paradox that would inspire her creativity
in her adult life.
The paradox of motherhood and trickster
of success
Hardin's life long paradox of her individuation
process was interplay of gifts and suffering,
the legacy of Pablita. Helen's first long-term
relationship with Patrick Terrazas was similar
to her relationship with her mother. She
found a former marine who was strong, attractive,
alcoholic and abusive. Helen spoke about
this time in her life.
My life between 18 and
25 was holy hell. It was a real torment
because I was always leaving Pat and going
to my mother, then to Pat and going to
my mother, then to Pat and then back to
my mother. Both of them were equally bad.
They were...playing squash with me...slamming
me against the wall (Ryder, 1986, p.34).
While with Patrick, Helen became pregnant.
She was steadfast and excited about having
this child. On November 11, 1964, Helen
gave birth to Margarete. In Helen's mind
and heart, Maragete was her greatest creation.
This child was very much loved and grew
up with the affection that Helen missed
(Margarete Bagshaw-Tindel, personal communication,
August, 1994). Helen now continues her motherline,
not only as a daughter, but also as a mother
and soon to be an artist in her right.
Sensing the complexity and danger of his
daughter's relationship with her mother
and lover, Herbert invited his daughter
and granddaughter to stay with him in Bogota,
Columbia in 1968. Helen again was embraced
by the protectiveness of her father. His
lifestyle in Columbia allowed her the safety
and luxury to focus on her art. He also
became the trickster when he orchestrated
her first one-woman show in Bogota that
year. His support helped Helen separate
from the abusive relationships of her mother
and lover, and also gain her own acclaim
as an artist.
With her first taste of her own personal
identity and artistic success, Hardin returned
to New Mexico and her work began to soar.
In 1970, the New Mexican Magazine featured
Helen on its cover; "Tsa-sah-wee-eh Does
Her Own Thing" . The evidence of her individuation
was at hand. Her work was becoming a bridge
toward healing the paradoxes of her life,
those irreconcilable opposites. Helen Hardin's
art is a poignant example of Jung's transcendent
function at work.
Jung (1968) envisioned the transcendent
function as the way the psyche unites the
conscious and unconscious, real and imaginal
and moves beyond its deep divisions of the
irreconcilable opposites. The psyche can
then create a new image and attitude that
heals the divided state. Jung (1968) considered
the transcendent function to the most significant
element in one's psychological and spiritual
growth and individuation process.
Hardin's individuation journey was tumultuous.
The Trickster of Success appeared again
in another form. In November 1972, Helen
collapsed and was briefly hospitalized for
depression. During the months of individual
therapy that followed, she began to see
the pieces of her life that had closed in
on her: the scars of childhood, an abusive
relationship, the strain of single motherhood,
and her constant compensations for the past
seen in her constant internal pressure and
her personal demands of herself as an artist.
Weeks after her hospitalization, Hardin
met Cradoc Bagshaw, a free-lance photographer
who she married in 1973. Cradoc gave her
the security she craved and her art flourished.
Within this creative family who loved and
accepted her, Hardin finally belonged. As
seen in Visions of Heavenly Flight
(see Figure 1), her work become more complex
layered and bore her geometric artistic
signature (C. Bagshaw, personal communication,
September 1994). This new found security
allowed her to plunge deeper into her internal
terrain.
Hardin's art was her bridge, her transcendent
function that helped her explore new images
and attitudes about herself. Jung's (1964)
belief in the transformative power of art
as a bridge to one's potential self now
becomes a guiding principal in her life.
Precision: the compensatory aspect of the
motherline and emergence of Tewa myths of
the feminine
An astonishing precision governed Hardin's
life and work. She was the "prophetess of
the compass, a sage of the ruler and a high
priestess of the protractor" (Scott, 1989,
p.40). Hardin's exactness helped her compensate
for her life's wounding as well as became
the portal to her Tewa spirituality. This
opened her to deeper explorations of the
spiritual with images from a universal source,
the collective unconscious: this repository
of human's psychic heritage and possibilities.
Jung (1961) wrote about a self-regulatory
function of the psyche that strives for
balance. He called this the compensatory
function. The unconscious tries to balance
any conscious tendency towards one-sidedness.
Quite in contrast to her unpredictable,
abusive, early years, Hardin's creative
work as an adult was very controlled and
detailed. She could work for thirteen hours
a day in her studio and she would not settle
for less than a perfect line. If one did
not suit her, she would wipe away layers
of her work. Etching on copper plates, Hardin
had chosen an unforgiving medium, which
allowed for no mistakes.
Similar to many people, who are raised
in unpredictable homes in which abuse and
hostility vie and toy with love and comfort,
Hardin developed a compensatory perfectionism
out of her striving to balance and heal
the initial injury. Within her art, she
would control and master her world, thus
overcoming the criticisms, rejections and
insecurity of her past. Her drive for perfection
was unyielding, but beyond anything that
could be seen as animus driven. Jung (1961)
talked about the masculine and feminine
energies held in each person. In a woman,
the masculine energy is called the animus.
When a woman is seen as possessed by the
need for perfection, she could be seen as
animus driven. Her Tewa heritage transformed
this drive into an unexpected aspect of
the feminine.
This compensatory drive also reflected
her internal strength as a fighter. These
unexpected aspects of the feminine are embraced
in the etching, Changing Woman (see
Figure 5). Embedded in this etching is the
Hopi and Navajo myth of "warrior woman"
The story is told by the treatment of the
hair. In this myth, a young woman is fixing
her in a bun (see the right side of the
plate). She is surprised by an attack on
her village by a warring tribe. All the
men are away at another battle. The young
woman must leave her hair undone (the left
of the etching) and defend her village and
her culture. Hardin is a warrior woman and
her art would rule with perfect aesthetic
integrity. Possibly, seeing herself as the
warrior woman was her way of fighting for
the love and favor not only of her mother
Pablita, but also of the Tewa world (C.
Ingram, personal communication, August 3,
1994; Allen, 1986 & 1991).
Yet there is still another unexpected aspect
of the feminine embraced by this piece.
It is the Navajo myth of Changing Woman.
Changing Woman is a model
for Navajo women. While changeable, she
is not fickle. She is independent, resourceful
and capable. Her powerful sense of self
does not depend on caprice, coyness, self-deprecation,
or self-centeredness, but is derived from
a perspective of dignity, equality, balance
and reason. She looks to the harmony of
the whole over vast lengths of time or
the definition of the good (Allen, 1991,
p.71).
The Sun wishes to marry Changing Woman,
but Changing Woman had demands to make.
She was the earth and changed with the seasons
and the sun revolved around her. She knows
they need each other to make the world whole
and to create harmony in the universe. But
if harmony was to occur, "each exchange
between us must be equal. .... This time
they embraced as equals, for Changing Woman
could see that he understood "(p.80)
Helen gives us two unexpected aspects of
the feminine that emerged from her precision
that was intertwined with her beloved Tewa
spiritual world. Hardin shows us herself
as a warrior and thinking woman. Helen wanted
to create women who are like Changing
Woman. In the contemporary art world,
she was also reacting against the artistic
treatment of Native woman as fat and idle.
Hardin said:
Their women (treatment
of Native American woman by male artists)
were large, and lifeless, large blobs.
Sort of doing nothing except being idle
and fat and wallowing in the daylight.
But women do more than this, and I wanted
to show thinking women. And my women are
not just Indian women; they're universal
women. So Changing Woman appeals to all
because they should change. This is what
I personally feel (I. Yang Slaughter,
personal communication, August 3, 1994).
By weaving these two myths, Helen creates
a Universal Thinking Warrior Woman. This
Archetype will eventually help her heal
and create a new image of herself.
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Figure 6. Harmony Brings
Gifts From the Gods (1982), Courtesy
of the Helen Hardin Estate Gallery.
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The transcendent function does in art what
it cannot do in life. Looking at Harmony
Brings Gifts From the Gods (see Figure
6), it is hard to believe that Hardin failed
geometry in high school. In her struggle
to gain more class time for her art while
in high school, she found her way into the
boys' drafting class. Always peeking out
of the corner of her eye at what the boys
were doing with their instruments, she began
unconsciously to incorporate geometry into
her work. She would return to geometry later
on, with her studies in anthropology at
the University of New Mexico.
It was through her love of anthropological
roots and origins that Hardin discovered
her ancestral links to geometry. The Hohokam,
Mogollan, Mimbres and Anaszi people were
her tribal forebears, and a doorway to the
collective unconscious. As well, she particularly
embraced the Mimbres geometric traditions
in design as can be seen in both Visions
of Heavenly Flight and Harmony Brings
Gifts from the Gods (see Figures 1 and
6). When preparing for her major work, she
would paint a small Mimbres-inspired piece
that she called her "Mimbres potboilers"
. Her embrace of her ancestor's use of geometry
allowed her access the precison she desired,
achieving it with her loved "gadgets" ,
her drafting tools (M. Bagshaw-Tindel, personal
communication, August 4, 1994).
The recovery of native inspiration also
opened her to a change in direction, as
she began to explore light, space and color
as well as the Tewa sense of time in her
work. In Harmony Brings Gifts from the
Gods (see Figure 6), Hardin creates
her masterly balanced of composition, line,
line form, mass, color, and Tewa time. This
painting began with a totally black background.
As she developed it, the image grew with
increasing bright color, light and shape.
This drive for perfection and integrity
in her work was Hardin's way of creating
order, an ultimate harmony of elements out
of chaos. Her personal ancestry became the
doorway to images from a more universal
source, what Jung (1954) called the collective
unconscious.
Precision also governed Hardin's approach
to preparing for her work. Margarete remembers
watching her mother's preparation ritual.
My mother would walk into
her studio, turn on her 100 watt light
bulbs above her drawing table, then turn
on her TV for her soaps or music. She
would then attend to her hands, which
were extremely important to her.
Methodically, like a Zen monk,
She would roll up sleeves
and smooth lotion on her hands for at
least twenty minutes. She would then process
to stir each individual egg carton container
of paint twenty times. She would sip her
coffee or tea and then she would begin
to work (M. Bagshaw-Tindall, personal
communication, August 4, 1994).
Margarete called her mother's preparation
ritual "a spiritual awaking" (M. Bagshaw-Tindel,
personal communication, August 4, 1994).
This ritual allowed her to communicate with
her Tewa spirits. The dance that was denied
her by the elders is permitted with each
stroke of her brush or etching tool. Helen
experienced being close to her gods or spirits.
In this numinous state, Hardin encountered
the god/spirit in its full power (Otto,
1917). Inspired by both dread and devotion,
she danced with her Tewa spirits throughout
her subsequent creative activity. Ultimately,
making art became like a meditation practice,
which permitted her spirits to create prayers
of almost perfect resolution, her paintings
(Scot, 1986).
The passions: Kachinas in the motherline
In contrast to her perfectionist precision,
Hardin painted from her own passion, in
the manner of a contemporary postmodern
artist. Her feelings for an image, song,
mask or myth directed her brush or etching
tool. Hardin made each symbols vibrate with
emotion and meaning. Lou Ann Farris-Culley
(1981) compared Hardin's to many contemporary
artists both Anglo and Native American and
lauded her ability to use metaphors to give
a universal spiritual message. Farris-Culley
(1981) stated that Helen achieved what many
failed to do, look deeply within the painting,
not outside to unravel the mysteries.
Passion also directed her personal life
and public career. She was forceful spokesperson
for Native American art and women. Stories
circulated around Santa Fe about Helen as
a sometimes-iconoclastic community member.
From those close to her, her passions were
as a loving, creative child, an absorbing
friend, loving mother and a fascinating
and compelling partner and wife.
One's passions in life can be directed
simultaneously by feelings of belonging
and of abandonment. Hardin's deep attachment
to her Native American legacy stemmed in
part from the rejection she experienced
from this very community. Both mother and
daughter were censured and isolated from
the Pueblo because of their work as painters.
Even more was denied Helen, her place in
the Pueblo dance, though her art demonstrated
her understanding of her Pueblo roots. In
the Tewa culture, the matrilineal cords
link all to their heritage. This cultural
and personal motherline cord was wounded
for Helen though the feminine body of the
dance.
In Metamorphosis (see Figure 7),
Helen uses the sacred image of the Kachina
to depict the love, longing and resentment
that stems from her passionate embrace and
rejection by the elders of the dance on
her feminine body and psyche. The Kachina
cosmology in the Hopi and Pueblo worlds
is one of paradoxes and difficult to understand.
These spirits are more human and less divine
and while they are venerated, they are not
worshipped. They are intermediaries and
the invisible forces of life. (Spinden,
1976; Tyler, 1964) Hardin could not imagine
living without her beloved Kachinas.
In Metamorphosis, all is held in
circle, an archetypal symbol of wholeness,
and a symbol of life itself for Hardin.
Yet everything else is fragmented. On the
right
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Figure 7. Metamorphosis
(1984), Courtesy of the Helen Hardin
Estate Gallery.
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side, the Kachina is the loving serene
spirit that is embraced by the culture.
With a round open mouth ready to receive,
a calm gaze, she is held in the energy of
the eagle's feathers that surround her face.
Like the calm side of warrior woman, her
hair is in place in a completed bun. On
the left side, the warrior woman has her
hair undone and holds the disturbing emotions
that emerge from rejection. Her eyes are
piercing, her teeth are jagged and blades
surround her face and are what interacts
with the outer world. Turquoise, a symbol
of healing encircles both sides, a striving
for individuation, a sense of wholeness.
It holds the numenousity of the dread and
desire for closeness to the Tewa world.
When Hardin was asked what Metamorphosis
was, Helen Hardin said, "It's a self -portrait
"(Scott, 1989, p. 10). With Metamorphosis,
Hardin had begun the process of transformation
that accepts both the pain and love of her
existence and of the Great Mother.
Here the Kachina emerges as the symbol
that will help her give birth to a new image
of herself and greatest artist creations.
With her human and holy feminine spirits,
Helen strove to heal this wounded motherline
though her creative work. Her art became
a bridge across the chasms in the motherline,
a means to transcend the pain, connect with
her culture to universal themes of other
and to realize herself as a universal woman.
The motherline and the sacred feminine
Helen Hardin's internal healing and bridging
of the wounds in the Motherline is best
depicted by her most ambitious and significant
works called the Women Series. With
her etched Feminine Trinity: Changing
Woman (see Figure 2), Medicine Woman
(see Figure 3) and Listening Woman
(see Figure 4), her sure hand begins to
resolve the paradoxes of her life by truly
acknowledging the universal and collective
in her images and art, to map the true identify
of her self.
Created in the three years before her death
from breast cancer (1981-83), Tsa-sahwee-eh's
Women are the accumulation of all the knowledge
and skill that she derived from her life
work. Hardin saw her women as sensitive,
emotional and intellectual. Her focus was
on the face not the body, although the body
is inferred by the use of elements of five
in each piece. Her women are truly strong
androgynous women, able to unite the masculine
and feminine, the emotional and cerebral.
Jung (1961) postulated that one of the ultimate
achievements of one's individuation process
was to hold the masculine and feminine in
conscious balance. Hardin achieves just
this with Women Series.
With this trinity of Madonnas, in striking
contrast to the masculine trinity of Christian
culture, she created her own spiritual deities.
Through these works, Hardin starts to connect
to her own divinity by linking herself to
the ageless Kachinas. This series represents
the pinnacle of her personal and spiritual
journey.
Changing Woman (1980-81), which
Hardin considered her most important piece,
is both a thinker and a warrior. Similar
to Metamorphosis, her face is divided in
half. Yet, this face represents both the
internal and external struggles. On one
side, there is a profile, which may represent
her lifelong struggle with family and cultural
relationships, Remember one of her first
childhood pictures was in profile. Here
she looks into herself her shadow: the pain
and inner conflicts that were locked away
and unaddressed. By showing us her shadow,
she permits herself to confront another
Tewa taboo; problems are never addressed
publicly, especially to another culture.
The frontal gaze is her confrontation with
her external Tewa and Anglo worlds: her
resolution of belonging to neither. Her
face is in a circle. She is striving for
wholeness and the universal cycle of life.
Perhaps it enabled her to hold and resolve
both her internal and external conflicts.
The turquoise circular beads, a sign of
good health and luck, bless her struggle.
She has a heart-line to the mouth and is
now able to speak openly from her heart.
Helen has much to say, but the message is
still in flux because she is speaking from
four directions. She is the constancy of
change.
Medicine Woman (1982), completed
before Hardin was diagnosed with breast
cancer, is replete with healing imagery.
Perhaps her close delicate link with her
personal and collective unconscious informed
her of her need for healing medicine. Margarete
recalled that while painting Medicine
Woman her mother had a "sinking sensation"
and knew emotionally that she needed "medicine
to go on" . (M. Bagshaw-Tindel, personal
communication, August 4, 1994). Margarete
found these notes on Medicine Woman:
Not a traditional Medicine
Woman, she is the side of Woman who expresses
the nurturing sense. She is the healing
spirit in the woman who calms the earth.
She is the only Woman in the series with
feathers (Ryder, 1986, p. 149-150).
Plumes and feathers in the Pueblo tradition
signify a healing spirit. Perhaps Helen
knew she needed nurturing feather spirits
to heal and deal with what was about to
happen in her life.
Medicine Woman is literally split
in two. She is both the hurt woman and the
healer of the self. Like Changing Woman,
she is looking in two directions at once.
She is cross-eyed and looks inward, but
knows she must do two things at once: "look
beyond what is within and know it" (M. Bagshaw-Tindel,
personal communication, August 4,1994).
She must find medicine in herself. Medicine
Woman portrays the ceremonial healer
able to hold the broken circle of both her
active anguish and her longing for healing.
She can now face herself because she can
now hold the split in the core and center
of herself. Medicine Woman was now
her ally in her battle with breast cancer.
Cradoc Bagshaw, Hardin's husband, remembers
how important this series was to her. He
understood that what she was engaged in
depicting was a metamorphosis actually taking
place as she created the work. In intense
discussions, she communicated the meaning
of her women to him. When she started Listening
Woman in 1983, Cradoc knew she had returned
from a distant part of her journey and that
"she had her feet on the ground again" .
(C. Bagshaw, personal communication, September
5, 1994)
This etching is the third of the trinity,
a symbol of creations, perhaps birthing
a new image of herself.
Listening Woman
is who I am becoming now. She looks straightforward.
She is very bold, very strong. She is
the strongest of the three so far. She
listens. She looks directly at you. She
is solid and self -sufficient and able
to absorb the sorrow of the universe (C.
Bagshaw, personal communication, September
5, 1994).
Listening Woman is the Kachina who
can embrace constant change as the dualities
are bridged. She holds all in an oval face,
more human than the other two. She is returning
to the conscious world. Her face has a clarity
that can be seen with the horizontal divide.
She speaks clearly with one mouth in the
four directions. With her head hunched into
her shoulders, she has more mass and substance
to absorb the sorrows of the universe. Her
straightforward glaze assures that she can
have compassion and the capacity for forgiveness.
Margarete states that her mother found
in Listening Woman an "Objective
self" who was willing to listen to her soulful
needs.
She (Helen) needed to
be objective and make decisions about
her life. Helen needed to get selfish
and draw on her objective self and let
go of anger and bias (M. Bagshaw-Tindel,
personal communication, August 4, 1994).
Listening Woman portrays compassion
as the ability to relinquishes the anger,
pain and resentment and move beyond them.
Perhaps this capacity to forgive emerges
only when we stop and listen to our "objective
self" , our own internal Listening Woman.
Helen Hardin seemed to know long before
her death that she was making a right angle
into people's souls and lives with her art.
Helen made videotape documentary eight years
before she died of breast cancer. In this
film she discussed her life, her art and
her relationship to death. Here again her
close link to the unconscious may have guided
her to this discussion on her art and dying.
I think the reason I don't
fear death is because I know that I'll
always be here through my paintings....It
is the reward of living and the reward
I have for those who survive me. It is
the only thing I can give that is really
me (Native American Public Broadcasting
Consortium, Inc., video, 1976).
When Helen lay dying in her home, she asked
to be surrounded by her Women. Her
family placed Changing Woman, Medicine
Woman and Listening Woman in
her room. On June 9, 1984 when Helen died,
the paintings were removed for she was one
of them now. She was one of the O-Khoo-Wah.
She was one of the cloud people.
The motherline continued: Margarete's
legacy
Margarete feels her most poignant inheritance
from her mother is her spiritual vision.
Helen is her spiritual heroine. However,
Margarete rebelled against following the
artistic tradition of her mother and grandmother.
She was pursued a career in medicine at
the University of New Mexico. Margarete
was only nineteen years old when her mothered
died. A few years later, she married Greg
Tindel and had continued the motherline
first as mother of two children: Helen and
Forrest. (M. Bagshaw-Tindel, personal communication,
June 11, 2000).
During her pregnancy with Forrest, she
began to draw with pastels. Margarete drew
in the middle of the night. Art making for
her had to be secretive, private
 |
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Figure 8. Twilight
Meets Dawn (1995), Courtesy of Margarete
Bagshaw-Tindel.
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and mysterious. Yet, she felt this was
the time to give birth to both forms of
creative expression: one as a mother and
other as an artist. The birth of Forrest
was an opening to a sacred magical territory.
She began to draw images that looked like
spatial figures. These images were "the
body of my soul and what I looked like that
day" . From this experience, she began to
embrace her creativity and artistic legacy.
She continued the artistic motherline after
the birth of her children, connecting with
the abundant feminine strength of her grandmother
and mother. Culturally, she has experienced
more of an embrace by the Pueblo for she
was allowed to dance with her tribe. She
feels the power and energy of the tribal
dance in her creations as in Twilight
Meets Dawn (Figure 8). Yet she connected
in a different way, not as a single mother,
but as a mother in relationship (M. Bagshaw-Tindel,
personal communication, June 11, 2000).
Margarete is cultivating the Motherline
in her daughter, Helen. Margarete's daughter
is not interested creating art right now,
but is "genius that we are trying to keep
up with" Helen is starting to understand
the legacy of her great grandmother, Pablita
and grandmother, Helen. She discovered them
in one of her New Mexican history books
and wondered "why they have to show up everywhere"
(Bagshaw-Tindel, 2000) The gifts of the
Motherline come in many packages, sometimes
wanted and sometimes not.
The gifts of the motherline
Helen Hardin's art has been a gift of passing
on the Feminine spirits of the Motherline.
When I encountered her work, her images
compelled me to grapple with my own Motherline
journey of individuation. Hardin's cultural
and historical wounding lent support to
mine, and inspired me to move beyond the
bounds of these personal injuries. Her images
opened in a deeply personal way to the power
of the Sacred Feminine.
Her life struggles and transformative creations
gave me tremendous support as an expressive
arts therapist. Her life and work clearly
demonstrate the power of one's creative
process and the transcendent function to
bridge, to heal and to transform (Chodorow,
1997; Knill, Barba & Fuchs, 1995; Lewis,
1993, Levine, 1999; Neuman, 1959).
Helen's spirit and I have created Motherline
workshops, called A Transcendent Journey
Through the Motherline that weave together
her story with participants' personal journey
through the expressive arts. We begin to
tell our Motherline stories first through
the body, our first connection to the motherline.
We explore our bodies and what was allowed
to be expressed and what was not. Then we
imagine our Mother's bodies, what they express,
and how it would feel to inhabit her body.
What would it be like to live in our grandmother's
body? With these kinesthetic images, we
move back to our own bodies and probe for
our somatic voice in movement. The energy
of the body gives raise to visual images
of our body's motherline. Together we paint
and draw, finding our way through color,
lines and form. Poetic words emerge to create
stories of our voyage through the body,
movement and visual images. We share our
integrative arts stories and our personal
and universal interconnections as women
through our Motherline.
With her angles, curves, circles, squares
and lines, Tsa-sah-wee-eh has passed on
her feminine spirit of aliveness, creativity
and spirituality. With her Motherline Lineage
of Pablita and Margarete, she takes us back
to the circle of our beginning to find new
healing images of ourselves as women.
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