It is my intention to publish this DVD photograph anthology in an effort to broaden understanding and appreciation of our Rock Art Heritage.  There are no new symbols only new ways to use them.  Petroglyphs are a fragile and endangered resource protected in many other parts of the world from encroaching development and in some extreme cases removed from open or public access.  Remoteness and inaccessibility have saved most of the extant Petroglyphs in Ka’u from destruction.  Due to the arid conditions many sites are preserved as weather-worn testimonials little changed by centuries of wind and wave.

How to Order?

 Around the world  Rock Art has left a mark on the trail of human consciousness.  Petroglyphs were used as  story boards of oral legends, and prayer vehicles.  Were they adornments?  Were they ever considered decoration?  Ancient tattoos revealed a wearers’ name, genealogy, beliefs, and dreams. Rock Art found in Hawaii is similar in many ways to Rock Art found in the American Southwest.  Both sources of  mystery, and controversy.  Do Petroglyphs have a basis found in natural forms or energy patterns?  Can we define signs and symbols as the same thing?  Was that a pictograph, an ideogram, or a pyschogram on the side of the Pioneer 10 spacecraft which left our solar system?  Is Modern Art a Symbol? What could Petroglyphs Mean?

 Man has made marks on rocks for centuries and is still doing so. The only 30,000 year old paintings still hanging around are on rocks.

  These are just some of the conceptual inquiries I have pondered while wandering through resource books and lava fields. An Artist’s mental meanderings, just like my search patterns criss-crossing the undulating pahoehoe surfaces of Kilauea, Mauna Loa, and Hualalai.

 The specifics of time before memory are open to conjecture.  History has always been written by the winners, but some pages are missing, undecipherable, stuck together or true forgeries. The geologic record reveals Ka’u to be an amalgamation of volcanic events overlaid with ash deposits from Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa and Kilauea punctuated with springs of fresh water. A fertile ground undisturbed, eagerly awaiting new seed from afar.  This was perhaps some  ±1500 years Before Present, (B.P.) when anthropologists acknowledge the earliest arrival of migrating families to these shores.  History contains many assumptions as facts within its redesigned covers.

Whatever the exact dates, time passed, people came, they did things, ate stuff, made babies, argued about this and that, put names on things, and went other places talking about everything they had seen and done along the way.  Not unlike contemporary society.  But this is oral history.  If you and everyone you know ceased to exist, who would speak your name, recall your face or be aware of your existence and recognize you as their progenitor?

 No survivors = No history.  Obviously procreation was a topic high on the list of important things to do. 

  The impulse to express a shared perception created language and spurred humanity’s development of pictographic symbology and society.  Communication is a primal desire. Story-telling is still the basis of some of the largest industries in our world, [the movies or the government or religion, take your pick]. The messages of Identity, the expression of life are behind our desire to make a mark upon the world or give birth to an idea which will outlive our mortality. 

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Disc 1 & 2 under reconstruction

DISC 3 POHUE Available Now