"God" or if you prefer "Big Bang"

180 x 180 cm

This is my first textile mandala. When I did it I had no idea about mandalas, I just wanted to do it like this. 

It was funny. We, my family and I, had recently moved to the south of Sweden, to the countryside were  the mire with its little island was.

After some weeks the priest came to see us and wish us welcome. I suppose he was curious to know if we were presumptive visitors to his church. We showed him around in the house as the custom is in our country. When we came to the room where I was working  with this rather big textile, the devil flew into me and I challenged the priest telling him that I was sewing God. 

”Oh”, he said. Nothing more, and he left the room.

In my point of wiew I would have got very surprised and also very interested. And he, the priest who talks about God every sunday just answers ”Oh”! I would have asked a lot of questions such as: Why? How do you think? How come you do it in this way? For me it was an invitation to something deeper than  normal talk about coffee and cookies. However it was a good way to discover that this priest was a traditional one, without curiosity about other ways of looking on life and God.

However, no dissapointment.

It took me six months to make this textile of ”God” or ”the Big Bang”. In the center there is ”everything and nothing”. I like to see it as a metaforic diamond. In the Big Bang this diamond explodes and divides in small small pieces of diamonds. From the heat, fire and smoke every little piece gets very dirty and has to be cleaned on its way back to the original diamond.

So, every glaspearl could be seen as an image of the soul that longs for being complete again. There is a continuous movement in both direccions, one of many many paradoxes in life. Both and ...

When the soul is very far away from the center the attraction is not so strong but it gets stronger and stronger the closer it comes. And once there, it  is thrown out again ... perhaps in on other direccion... a continuos big bang...

Or, using God and the number 7,  the center  IS, that what is BEYOND everything. It divides in 7 ”Sub-Gods” wich could be seen as the different religions in our world. Every 7 divides in 7 again wich makes 49, which divides again in 7 which makes 343. There I had to stop. No more place nor pacience to sew more pearls. (there are about 23.000 of them)