Inspired by Dion Fortune's Psychic Self-Defense: The Classic Instruction Manual for Protecting Yourself Against Paranormal Attack published in 1930, I carved an 11' wooden stake from a white pine tree removed from my property and designed a welded steel foundation to support and direct its potential in a specific way.

There was a nearly dead forty-five foot tall white pine tree on my property that I needed to remove because it was next to a home with a newborn. I was overwhelmed by its potential for destruction as well as the terror at having to take responsibility. I feared it might smash a building or kill someone but I felt frozen to take action. Normally, I figure out a way to do things myself, but in this case I knew I had no ability to take down such a tree and I was having trouble finding a tree service who was able to schedule the job during the pandemic. I was also paralyzed by the thought of the expense. I wanted to run away, but knew I had to transform my fear and helplessness. I had the idea to approach the problem as an art project as a way to reconnect with my boldness and to remember the feeling of embodying initiative. Once I realized that I could apply methods from my art practice to this life circumstance, art became my teacher, and I began to hear the tree speaking to me saying "Look at me, I'm a giant wooden stake and I want to help you!" 

At the same time, I was rereading Dion Fortune's book Psychic Self-Defense: The Classic Instruction Manual for Protecting Yourself Against Paranormal Attack published in 1930 where she discusses the literal manifestation of vampiric energies and vampires themselves as people, circumstances, experiences, and entities that deplete us for their own gain. I had read the book as a young person and was now surprised to realize how her description of this system had maintained its relevance and how it paralleled the language of healthy boundaries as discussed in contemporary psychology. 

Vampiric energies accumulate through life experiences and interactions with other people and entities who intentionally or not connect their psyche to us. Unhealthy past relationships, traumas, and global events like the pandemic have the potential to develop longterm harmful effects on our beings and we need to develop tools to combat this dynamic. Thinking and working this way is one way art processes can help us.

I designed, built, and activated the tree into a large healing tool sculpture that can neutralize the effects of psychic vampirism and other unhealthy energetic connections that impact our wellbeing. To start, I stripped the bark off of an eleven-foot length of the white pine and my son helped me with his chainsaw to carve one end into a sharp point. The base is a prism made of two welded steel equilateral triangle structures that elevate and position the point of the sculpture directly at heart level maximizing its power to blast away the psychic and etheric connections one inadvertently accumulates throughout life.

The sculpture is a giant cleansing machine. It targets etheric and energetic fields and tethers that become attached to ones outer bodies over time. It's meant to cleanse the outer bodies by obliterating unhealthy energies and connections, prohibit vampiric energies from sinking their fangs into the many dimensions of our psychic, physical, mental and emotional spheres, and to destroy the parasitic relationship dynamic vampires establish and maintain with our physical host bodies against our will and awareness. The sculpture is interactive. People were invited to stand in front of it, connect with its design, and have their own healing experience.