‘Men cannot live without mystery. He has a great need of it.’

John Fire Lame-Deer (1903-1976)

In this extraordinary painting, a space shuttle has crashed, causing a crater to form and the land to displace in colourful, rippling waves creating a clearing. It is both totem pole, space shuttle and jack-in-the box. There is something circus-like about the scene. The clearing has become a circus ring, in which the totem is a clown (a heyoka, or sacred clown) performing a rickety balancing act, and the surrounding scenery – the earth - has become the rippling audience, agape to see what will happen next. Paradoxically, at the same time as crashing, the space shuttle is about to blast off. It has strands of flaxen-red hair which streams out of it, like fire, and it rises from a bed of feathers which are both funeral pyre and the fire from take-off.

The totem pole is a symbol used by First Nation people with which they memorialise their ancestry and document their histories. It is both a memorial to a significant moment in their history and sometimes mortuary pole to commemorate the deceased. Here, poignantly, there is a black-haired scalp with plait that makes up part of the rocky fabric of the totem. It is pierced by a straight, rigid spike – like a stake - which is the only straight and upright object in the painting and which, both pierces, and holds the structure together. Interestingly, the space shuttle nose of the totem is the same colour as the sky and the other parts (some of them like casino chips, and one hazy crescent moon) are earth coloured: they are of the landscape.

The space race is as pertinent now as it was in the 1980s with man’s desire to reach space at the forefront of the news. Here, the wonky space shuttle is fragmented, and it seems it is only time before it is subsumed and enveloped by the writhing land; or perhaps it does make its rickety way to be lost in the misty sky. It has become an emblem itself – a totem memorial – of its own history and mankind’s reverence for science which has superseded a reverence for nature and the earth. It is a memorial to the inexorable, incessant creep of progress.

Orlik painted Totem in his apartment in New York and shipped it to England in 1985. On its tenth flight on 28th January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger catastrophically broke up seventy-three seconds after liftoff, killing its seven crew. The Space Shuttle Columbia completed twenty-seven missions before its disastrous flight on 1st February 2003 when it disintegrated on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere; all seven crew members died.