Borgund, Sacred Circle

"Borgund" Sacred Circle, Brian Fisher, original digital art





































 Scientists who look at the spiral building blocks of nature, our DNA, find stacked interlocking circles. From the whorls of our fingertips, the irises of our eyes, to our cells and the egg that gave each of us life, we are manifestations of the circle.

My images about circle reflect it’s symbolic nature. Their names reference the sacred sites, temples, cathedrals, that more often than not were built and built again upon already sacred sites. 

My print Borgund references a medieval wooden church located at Borgund in Lærdal Norway beside the Sognefjord.  It is one of the best preserved stave churches in Europe and combines Christian motifs and Viking themes. Related to timber framing, a stave church is built with post-and-beam construction and it’s wall frames are filled with vertical planks.

The walls and doors of Borgund church are heavily carved with runic inscriptions.  Near an entrance column one carved inscription translates, “Thorir carved these runes on the eve of Olavs-mass, as he travelled past here. The Norns (Fates) created measures of good, evil, and great toil before me.”

The Norns that Thorir described are of pre-Christian, Norse myth and are the dieties of fate present at every birth. Their names are Urd “What Once Was”, Verdandi “What Is Coming into Being”and Skuld “What Shall Be. 

I like that the Borgund church, built as a Christian place of worship, included other ways of seeing because we are never one thing or another but always we are all things. 

Check out Borgund and my other Sacred Circles during the VIVA Art Studio Tour, Saturdays and Sundays, December 1-2 & 8-9, 2018.

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