"Cor Leonis"
Artist:  Michael Ford Dunton
Location:  McEuen Park-West

"Cor Leonis" is a musing on source, emergence and growth.  During the many hours of its creation, I came to imagine it as a living pod out in the depths of the universe birthing the seeds of stars that would drift out to light the sky.  My process is not finding a form to express an idea, the form sets itself in my mind first and through its manifestation I discover what it says, or means, to me.  That is my hope for the viewer, that the object engages them, moves something in them and its definition is theirs.

The name Cor Leonis came by serendipitous means.  We keep a large, old dictionary open in our house and, from time to time, move the pages and toss a small stone on it. Where it lands becomes the word of the day. When the time came to give the piece a name, I did this and the stone landed on Regulus: the largest star in the constellation Leo also known as Cor Leonis (Heart of the Lion).  A star that is actually a cluster of stars and is known as the harbinger of spring and new life.
In alchemy: the pure metal at the bottom of the crucible after separation from ore.