Imagine that you are visiting Wholeo Dome. You walk inside and the stained glass
dome surrounds you. The numbered descriptions and pictures on this page focus on the main
areas.
The first photo is an image map.
To get your bearings, on the image map, notice the
directions:
E - top, N - right, W - bottom, S - left. (If this
doesn't help, ignore it.)
Each number on the image map is linked to a
photo and local map. A number on each local map marks the location of the
photo
with respect to the overall design. The number shows what you are looking at.
There is a description, small GIF image, and tiny local map of each area.
As you read, click on the text or the small image to see
a large hi-resolution JPEG image. Click on the local map or "Back to Contents" to return
to the top of the page.
Wholeo, the stained glass dome Copyright Caroling 1974
All Rights Reserved.
Click a number on the image or words below. Start.
Secret garden: installation design by Elizabeth O
Mlulu.
1 Outside Wholeo Dome
The dome looks like freestanding color. It is a hemisphere made of leaded glass
panels supported by a geodesic aluminum frame. The antique handblown glass pieces
have sometimes been stained, painted, and fired in a kiln or etched in acid
to reveal layered colors. The glass is put together with strips of lead to form
panels of various shapes and sizes. The average panel is three feet across.
The panels are laid onto a geodesic tube frame dome and leaded together.
Wholeo Dome is like a giant lampshade, big enough to walk inside. An observant
child said, "Wholeo Dome is small from the outside and big from the inside."
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2 Wide angle view inside
Looking into Wholeo Dome from the east, a wide-angle view of the entire expanse of
color engulfs you. This is the top part of a globe, a sculpture to be in. Colors
act as light and space conditioners. Transparent glass panes open up small windows
to the space outside the dome, while colored light beams in. You move in a mind-expanding
richness of color dimensions.
Broad arcs of colors come from behind you in the east and sweep across the
dome to the west, ahead of you. The colors stretch along the sun path from
its rising in the east to setting in the west. Study the rainbow arcs woven
with the images. The arcs change from green at the left in the south, through
aqua, deep blue, earth tones overhead, magenta, red and gold at the right
in the north.
In this view, it is high noon and people are bathed in colored light.
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3 All around view of Wholeo Dome
Here's looking at Wholeo Dome from the middle of the floor straight up and all around
360 degrees. This map is a fisheye lens view, which you can see if you lie down
with your head to the north and your feet to the south. Notice the paths of
the rainbow colors from green at your feet, through aqua, deep blue, magenta,
red, and gold.
The design of Wholeo Dome is deliberately a patchwork. Each figure serves as
a ground for another figure, making a rich tapestry of visions that invites
your participation.
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The scale and size of Wholeo Dome
This drawing shows how a person fits into Wholeo Dome. Conceptual design "Scale of
Wholeo Dome" Copyright 1995 by Elizabeth O Mlulu.
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4 Looking south: a figure
In the south, in the green arc, sits a person in contemplation, asking for visions
of the whole self. It could be you or me. The person's head is in a breathing
cloud. Air flows in and out, mixed with colors and tiny spectrums, refreshing
the atmosphere. Above that is a greatly enlarged detail of the pineal gland.
This gland is sometimes called the "inner eye." It appears to be radiating light.
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5 Bathed in aqua light
Surrounding the green arc is aqua. It is swimming with tiny energy sources that
spark life in our world. I call them "cosmic juices" and show them as gold sandwiched
between deep greens. Each cosmic juice is a node that anchors or supports an
aspect of life.
Here a child chooses to bathe in the light that is colored aqua by the glass.
She can move to be in green, blue, red, and other rainbow colors if she follows
the sun beams across Wholeo Dome.
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6 Dawn in the east: birth
Close up, the person sees what is most familiar. That is the arc of birth, consciousness,
and death. Birth is placed in the east near the rising sun, consciousness at
high noon, and death near sunset in the west. In this view, the "Smallest Unit
of Life" is the rounded form in the east, seen at sunrise. Blue spirals counter-clockwise,
red clockwise, and a yellowish green zap twists up the center between the poles.
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7 Noon, consciousness
Consciousness appears as an imaginative vision, a cross-section of a brain cell.
It is a circle set against a cutaway view of the sphere of the emotions, (in
red and blue yin-yang swirls). Each quadrant of the brain cell is shown in a
different phase of activity related to its six rods. Lower right, different
signal flows obscure all but the yellow ends of the rods. Lower left, a single
signal is coming onto a rod. Upper left, signals are stored on rods in black
bands, like bar codes. Upper right, the rods, excited and lit up like lanterns,
project the information in concentric circles of associations.
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8 Sunset in the west: death end
To the left in this picture are active parts of the aqua arc, especially a proto-cell
forming. Follow the sun path on down to earth in the blue arc. At the top, sudden
death comes as a lightning crack through the rigid weave of a round manhole
cover design. Moving on down, inevitable zigzags express slow death. Down farther
at death end, forms lie down on the ground. To the right is the part of the
blue arc dedicated to breathing out. It is shown as turbulence around a black
hole.
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9 Closeup of death end
Waves of life lose their spring and align in rich darks, relaxing down the last
steps. At death end, colors fade, becoming twilight grey, then disappear. It
is as the light leaves at the end of each day.
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10 Spring, creation
Having seen the sun-path arc of our life story and the black hole of breathing
out for the last time, the person looks beyond and finds a miracle. A brilliant
glow of yellows, fragile new growth greens, and flashing angles is a source
of arcs. The jewel has six sides. The bottom arc is grounding, earth. To the
lower right is the deep blue arc that the person knows well. Above it spring
green and brown arcs. To the left spring the magenta and red arcs.
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11 Spring, breathe in
In the lower right of this picture, at the very beginning of the blue arc is
a wavy cleft, a gap that illuminates breathing in. Each vertical breath is drawn
up, gathered by energy centers along the spine and circulated out horizontally
in spiral paths. At the top, overhead, breath rests in wholeness, symbolized
by a circular disk.
The person gazes and learns to synchronize breathing with the visual design
in glass: breathing up along the spirals to the count of eight, holding for
eight in the circle aloft, then descending, breathing out for eight, and resting
at the base bud before beginning another round.
By learning to breathe consciously, the person sees beyond the near arc
of birth and death and has a chance to escape the black hole of breathing
out unconsciously.
The green and brown paths mingle, tumbling and twisting vibrantly. Inspired
by the illuminated breathing, they carry circular drops of wholeness aloft.
As they merge for a moment above the breathing gap, in a golden swirl of nodes,
imagine a possible start of a new species. Let it be called a "tweezle wootz."
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12 Beyond the sun path
Turning to look across the dome from east to west, shows the sun path and beyond
from a different perspective.
Wholeo Dome is filled with poetic details to be discovered gradually over the
years. Top left, sun lights triangles joined by four small discs, banded above
and below with green/gold sandwiches. The triangles outline the skeleton of
events that appear sketchily as dotted waves in the next panel along the sun
path (see 7 Noon, consciousness).
The breathe in panel is top right. The full path of cosmic juices transmuted
in a person leads drops of wholeness back down to earth at the bottom.
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13 Looking north, overview
Moving to the south, you look north from the point of view of the person in
the green arc. A rounded deep blue panel above gives off fine waves of rainbow
colors with the aura of a mandala. Below, forms spiral dynamically in a warm
red glow of presence, of spiritual being. See the aura as an expression of the
magenta arc. See an exploded microscopic view of the being in the red arc, converging
on gold, centering.
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14 Essence of being
The entire northern part of the dome radiates a red halo. Within, intricate
forms hint at the essential qualities of a spiritual being, a wholly developed
person. The red stands for unconditional love, home fires, the hearth, and blood.
It also stands for lust, anger, and violence. Red expresses the entire range
of human passion that releases on the way to becoming whole. It evokes the path
with heart.
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15 Being: closeup to left
This photograph zooms up to the left of the being, in the far northwest of Wholeo Dome.
A spiral twists up to toward another tweezle wootz.
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16 Aura/Wavelength notation
The mandala up north in Wholeo Dome has two aspects: an aura and wavelength notation.
(See cross-references.)
You could use the blue shapes between the colors as a literal notation for
wavelengths of light. Red, the longest wavelength, is the longest shape, clustered
in the middle. Orange, the next longest wavelength, is a shorter shape, and
surrounds red in the mandala. The other colors (yellow, green, aqua, blue,
and violet) have progressively shorter wavelengths and shapes. So they move
toward the edge in that order. Using the notation, you can draw colors in
black and white.
As an aura, the warm red physical heart is in the center. The colors gradually
cool as they step through the spectrum toward the outer edge, where they meet
the white light of spirit.
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17 Up, front, center: triangulation
The circular panel up south in Wholeo Dome has two aspects: relationship and triangulation.
The two orbs (of pink partially covering gold behind) could be planets,
people separated in space and time, or aspects of yourself. They relate directly
and through the stars. For example, when I go on vacation, I can relate to
my city life through the stars, which remain relatively fixed with respect
to both locations.
Given three points, if you know the distance between two of them and the
angles to a third point, you can find the distances to the third. The calculation
is called triangulation. In Wholeo Dome, two points are prisms located on separate
orbs of pink and gold. The third point can be any one of the stars around.
In this panel, the paths come round, encompassing stars and planets. Suddenly
a macrocosm, a telescopic view zooms amidst the microcosmic, cellular or personal,
feeling-level processes. Triangulation lets us probe and understand vast spaces
through the power of our minds and creative imaginations. We find meaning
in the cosmos. Processes we discover within or without can be equally valid.
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A curved table for glazing
Wholeo Dome's panels were made (glazed) on custom-built curved tables. This picture
shows the first concave table, holding glass cut and ready for leading. That
is, the next step is to fit strips of lead between the pieces of glass, solder
the joints, and force cement under the lead.
The table is made from curly wood shavings called excelsior, plaster, and
2' x 4's cut to the curvature of the dome. The next set of tables and shipping
forms were cast in plastic using this table as a mold.
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18 Breathing cloud spectrums
Visitors to Wholeo Dome often reach out to the colored light and to catch rainbow
spectrums floating by. In this picture, hands receive light and are refreshed
with breezes from the openings in the breathing cloud.
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Geodesic tube framework
Here is Wholeo Dome with panels half installed. The northern half of the dome
is bare. You can see the aluminum frame skeleton that is ready to hold up
the skin of leaded glass panels. When finished, Wholeo Dome stayed up at this
site in Monte Rio, CA for six years. Now it is up at The Farm School in Tennessee.
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Secret garden: installation design by Elizabeth O Mlulu
| Tilted up
Conceptual installation design "The Secret Garden of Wholeo Dome" Copyright 1995
by Elizabeth O Mlulu. This design is called a secret garden because you must
get a key to enter the locked gate to the garden. Also, only the exterior of
the dome is visible from outside the wall.
You walk across grass and up steps into the dome. Below, a reflecting pool
shimmers in the colored light.
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This page last modified : 17 August, 2008 
Return to the Wholeo Dome Exhibit page ~ {Wholeo
Dome}
1 Outside Wholeo Dome 
2 Wide angle view inside 
3 All around view of Wholeo Dome 
The scale and size of Wholeo Dome 
4 Looking south: a figure 
5 Bathed in aqua light 
6 Dawn in the east: birth 
7 Noon, consciousness 
8 Sunset in the west: death end 
9 Closeup of death end 
10 Spring, creation 
11 Spring, breathe in 
12 Beyond the sun path 
13 Looking north, overview 
14 Essence of being 
15 Being: closeup to left 
16 Aura/Wavelength notation 
17 Up, front, center: triangulation 
A curved table for glazing 
18 Breathing cloud spectrums 
Geodesic tube framework 
Secret garden: installation design by Elizabeth O Mlulu
| Tilted up
