2025.10.22 Gwen Smith 1099 LRG 1.jpg
2025.01.21 Gwen Smith1031 SML.jpg

In 721 AD, two Kannon statues were carved from a single sacred tree in Nara. While one was kept at Nara’s Hasedera Temple, the other was set adrift at sea with a prayer that it would appear wherever people needed a savior.

Legend says the statue drifted for fifteen years, eventually washing up in Kamakura in 736 AD. It is even said that oysters attached themselves to the figure, protecting it and helping guide it to shore. 

The photograph of the Kakigara-inari Goddess (oyster shell shrine) is collaged /embellished by a photography session shot in 1992 for the book- Good Black Nudes (with me as the subject)

The alternate collage- Othering the ship (Original) - [exhibited in THE ROSE at CPW, Kingston May -August 2025] uses the same photo shoot from 1992 and a gouache painting based on an abstract linear sunset and the cover of the Endgame catalog.

BODHISATTVA CORRELATIONS -2025

I photographed shrines and temples on my recent trip to Japan and found an affinity with representations of bodhisattvas (a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings) These figures and the “plank” behind them- a symbolic element known as a mandorla - emphasizing the radiating light frames the auras that encircle the body of a sacred figure representing spiritual enlightenment, signifying the transcendence of reality beyond ordinary time and space the forms echo the photographs of me with a surf board.