These "Harbingers" murals are to me fateful messengers. They have always been with us - with me in particular.

As our civilization has adopted a human only centric cosmic planetary path, one that completely ignores the organic oneness of a closely interconnected symbiotic cosmic being. The Harbingers stand as a testament proclaiming humanities refusal to perceive or even acknowledge this earthly reality as a delicately balanced intricately bonded whole. They reveal the unsettling truth surrounding our unfolding and soon possible planetary termination.

The Harbingers are beacons, guides that I have only recently learned to recognized within myself, conveying humanities power lays not in our technological accomplishments but in our attitudes and understanding of the primal cosmic values of living within sustainable planetary means.

It is definitely ironic for me, one who believes religion is part of the multi-layered destructive forces here on the planet, to be working with human imagined religious symbols. The physical reality of the Harbingers comes from within the Hindu faith; they are deities called Yoginis. As guardians, helpers of Goddess Kali they ward off and fight evil. I photographed them in India in '91 and 1993 during the Kali Puja (a religious festival). Kali within Hinduism represents the concept of endless ongoing cycles of cosmic creation, preservation, and destruction.

I remember the ordeal of purchasing the river mud and straw statues in the lane ways of Kurmartuli from the artisans who made them. Sometimes I stayed near by the artisans workshops to photograph the images. Other times I hired trucks and moved these "guardians" several miles through the overly crowded highly polluted streets of Calcutta. Always fearful of their being damaged as they swayed and banged together in open flat bed rickety Indian "lorries", I struggled to locate suitable background walls and more importantly quiet locations outside the crowded teeming core of the city.

I was drawn visually just like a magnet and without reason to these guardians. It took long, exhausting days to photograph the mural segments using an old fashion 8x10 Deardorff sheet film camera. I had to wait constantly for the sun to escape from cloud cover. The days were very hot and humid and always very frustrating.

This is, the first time in my forty years of creating imagery, that I was lead back to reworking old imagery. In 1991 and '93 the visual allure of the Yoginis was more practical, I had no perception then of what their true power would ultimately reveal to me. Today I view them as fateful messengers, my "Harbingers". They are also an acceptance within me that there will always be a scattering of truth found in most of our ancient human religious imaginings.