Catherine Thompson - An Stiúideo Fiáin

Welcome to An Stiúideo Fiáin representing the multi-disciplinary work of  Catherine Thompson. ie. me Welcome! If you have found yourself here thinking you were heading to fiain.ca it is because I have transferred my site, fiain.ca, from a regular hosting service to this one based on Blogger. I'm doing this for two reasons. One: so that I can have easier, simpler access to the site whilst travelling (often away from my computer) for updates. and Two: for purely financial reasons. As each year goes by, it seems that I am pulling more and more away from what you might call 'the grid'; living on less and less 'cash'. This 'Home' page is where I'll post new and upcoming stuff as it comes about. The name an stiúideo fiáin is Irish (gaelic) for 'the wild~uncultivated~feral studio' a quest for untamed discipline in all things ... music, visual/material, arts all things living, living as true as possible attempting the seemingly impossible task of casting away the bonds of a modern industrial life to find answers within the natural world trying to balance the ancient with the new to see if listening to the deep sounds can forge a new path to find the touchstone to a new world. A major part of all my work at the moment is connected to The Sun and The Wind. The most recent incarnation of this journey is quite literally, a journey - travelling on horseback, living on the land, learning from my equine companions and the people that I meet along the way that have opened up their hearts to us. The spring of 2013 will find us moving once again. Please go to The Sun and The Wind in the links above for more information. The Sun and The Wind project is the search and struggle to find the state where all life spoke as one, when all were as one. To search for a deep and sure connection with the natural world; of mythic imagining and re-vision-ing. To resist the destruction of the wild. "In the very earliest time, when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference. All spoke the same language. That was the time when words were like magic. The human mind had mysterious powers. A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences. It would suddenly come alive and what people wanted to happen could happen all you had to do was say it. Nobody could explain this. That’s the way it was." This quote from Nalungiaq, an Inuit woman interviewed by Knud Rasmussen early in the 1900’s (source: The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram) illustrates perfectly the feelings and motivations of my work in general and The Sun and The Wind in particular.