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Wood Snake, Leidy Churchman’s first exhibition in China, invites us to participate in an ecology of the invisible. This concept encourages a broad and more humble understanding of our interconnectedness with various systems and the need to account for their complex, unseen dynamics. Presented in 17 paintings and a protean sequence of sculptures, this new work defies the urbanization of our experience and operates in the liminal space between direct perception and our own multi-layered relative experience.

The “wood snake” of Chinese astrology is said to symbolize transformation and growth.  Its qualities are creative and precise, flexible and mysterious. “I began painting sticks into snakes like I had when I was younger. Then learning it was the year of the wood snake, I sensed the embodiment of the ultimate; poking out of holes, appearing without end, throughout the mundane world.”

This is also the playground of the archetypal “trickster.”  This shapeshifter appears across cultures and mythologies, disrupting systems and ideas that bind us – trickster plays all sides. Upending what we think we know about the world, the trickster emerges at precisely the moment we think we have things figured out. 

The painting Feeding The Eternal Infinite depicts a cosmos at once exploding into existence and receding from it. Everything moves through everything else, and all is in motion. Among the cluster of sculptures titled Rain of Wisdom, a chorus of shells, each granted only one eye, watches us. Or do they, in fact, grant us a window into a kaleidoscopic ultra-reality through this open eye? Experienced together, the paintings and sculptures conspire to playfully expose the profound co-emergence of realities that occur in – and as – our world. 

Churchman’s own journey includes a long-term and sustained study of the esoteric teachings of Zangchuan Buddhism, and recently, the insights of Martín Prechtal, an author, artist and teacher whose work focuses on spirituality and indigenous cultures. Prechtel’s own understanding of evolution infuses Wood Snake. “The idea is that everything is plants,” says Prechtal. “Animals are a kind of plant. They are just a kind of plant that walks around or swims, or flies… when you get down to it that whole system of being is inside the bigger systems of beings. So, that means you are part of that, and it’s not all inside you, you are inside it.”

The paintings and sculptures imbue our understanding of the vast interplay occurring in our world. Like the wood snake of astrology and the archetypal trickster they are divine messengers of the nature of reality.

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