Altered Book Pages- Chakra HandBook - Muladhara 1
(Cover) Altered book, magazine clippings, pearlescent inks, rubber stamps 2009
The lowermost and most physically-oriented chakra is Muladhara, also called the root chakra, located at the base of the spine. Its function is to focus on our physical survival, to "ground" us. According to chakra philosophy, there is a "liberating current" that spirals upwards through the chakras from the root chakra to the crown chakra in the top of the head and a "manifesting current" that spirals downwards from the crown to the root. All the chakras need to be open and complete for both currents to be balanced.
The color of this chakra is traditionally considered to be red. If you follow the colors of the rainbow, the hues go from the lowest-energy visible wavelength of light (red) at the lowest chakra, to the highest-energy (violet) at the topmost chakra. I dabbed a couple different hues of red on the cover, finishing with a pearlescent coppery red, which shows just a little in the photo. There is a stamping in the center of a front cover of a petroglyph-style spiral, and the center of the back cover shows a tiny atom, building-block of matter. Both are metallic gold, so they show up fairly well in real life, and if you squint you can see them in the photo. This chakra is represented on the cover since it is the most materially-oriented, and a book's cover wraps around and contains the rest of the pages as our physical body contains our other aspects. The magazine clippings continue the material theme; a cutout of hoodoos from Bryce Canyon is earthy, and a moonlike circle of DNA shows another building-block of life. The orange of the next chakra can be seen at the edges of the front, and the violet of the last one at the back cover.
Rubber stamps from Lost Angeles Rubber Works and ASLstamp.com. Many other supplies used (such as ink) are available from Arts'n'CraftSupplies.com
Altered layout copyright 2010 Kendra Harness/Lost Angeles Rubber Works