TULKANIAN BOOKS

Tulkanian - an artist's statement

As a young man, I grew up feeling that there was a missing culture in our global history. As I grew and learned more and more about history, I shared this only rarely with others. The reason seemed clear to me as I read mythology or religions and saw the commonalities that they all shared. There had to be some connections. Ultimately my uncle shared a similar thought and belief with no proof. It all was right there if one looked.

In the late 1990s watching NOVA, there was a show about the mummies of the Gobi Desert. These mummies were buried in a similar fashion as those of Egypt and at about the same time. The episode went on to discuss the history of this missing Caucasian culture that lived along the Silk Road and cared for the travelers along that road through a series of connected taverns and hostels. This culture was witness to thousands of traditions and cultural expansions. They never created a nation-state like china and were often absorbed into it, yet as a culture they were unique and distinct. Caves have been discovered along these paths that have images of Buddhas, diagrams like the I-Ching, and writings on the wall which while untranslateable they look like the combination of many different cultures together. This group, it was believed, had a religion like the early Bon, precursors to Tibetan Buddhism and also Mongols. Honored shaman and leaders guided this culture over thousands of years. Ultimately the Mongol hords destroyed or absorbed them into their own culture and what remains are the descendants in Ajerbajan.

This discovery proved my feelings, dreams and ideas that there was a hidden link between many spiritual and religious traditions. For me, I see this culture as holding a storehouse of human awareness, stories and history and until destroyed by the more self centered faiths that believe in the invulnerability of the ego and its eternal place in paradise, I think that this group shared a common method of communicating through thought, intuition and other non-self-oriented means.

From these various places, I began to merge and tug different aesthetic concerns together to form a body of work that I call the Tulkus or the “lineages”. Written and created from a completely intuitive place yet cross informed by the many cultural contexts that I have studied, the Tulkus are to be read, decoded, understood from an intuitive and unconscious level. I muse about the idea like this, “what if we had discovered a great hidden library of the culture between cultures?” As a result, these books would be in that collection.

What kind of topics, science or observations would these people have made as they hosted the stories and cultures of the world intersecting along the great trade routes? What would they have been interested in on a daily basis? And what kind of world view would they have? More universal? It is obvious that they were able to stay connected and contiguous over a vast 4000 years without upsetting many of the cultures or empires that passed through their doorways. And what if their culture was the one that survived over the more violent ones that ultimately destroyed them? How many perceptions and awarenesses have we lost with the defeat of these kinds of cultures, tribes and territories on the relentless pursuit of ownership?

To the lost cultures of the world is the Tulku set of books dedicated.

Tulku 2244

Tulku 2244 is a small book, 4.5x7" available at Arches Bookstore and Back of Beyond Books in Arches UT.

Triple Tulku

Triple Tulku is a small book about the nature of space. Limiting it to black and white with touches of red. This intimate series of three small books can disappear into the palm of ones hand being less than 3x3 inches. There are only a few sample pages of these three books as they are in private collection.