ARTIST STATEMENT:

BALANCING COSMOLOGIES

Over the past 7 years, along the Amazon River in South America and in the hilly terrain of a tiny village, Mimongo, in Gabon, i’ve been humbly learning traditions of healing that are ancient and alchemical.

These apprenticeships and initiations involve learning to work with sacramental and entheogenic Plant Medicines, the chemistry of these substances finding current synthetic correlates in western state-of-the-art-treatments for complex trauma (cPTSD) and addiction.   

In West Africa, the heart of Pangea and the birthplace of humanity, i was invited to partake in a Bwiti cultural and spiritual tradition of female initiation, "Mabanji-Boumba", that has survived mostly unchanged from Paleolithic times.

My work emerges out of these journeys into the timeless, the non-linear, the ancient and alchemical. Comprehensions and understandings within these spiritual containers are non-verbal, ineffable, vibrational, metaphysical and symbolic. They are transmitted through energetic frequency, tone, sound, and music, via individual voice and communal song.

My work is deeply rooted in Animism and in reverence to a sentient Earth. It has been described as: “…aris(ing) from the intersections of autobiography, mysticism, cultural memory, and the sacred feminine”, inviting viewers “to step into dialogue with nature, science, spirituality, and myth”. 

As an artist i am self-taught, drawing on traditions of Folk Art, Outsider Art, and Art Brut.  My visual language describes and communicates ideas about Interspecies communication, plant consciousness, and ancient practices of deep listening. 

As a clinical psychologist apprenticing within Indigenous medicine traditions, i experience the human body as a living archive, holding the stories, traumas, and wisdoms of generations. 

As a scientist/researcher, i understand that we are both particle and wave.

My work finds resonance in :

the Earth-Body art work of Ana Medieta;

The inpatient psychiatric work of Dr Nise DaSilviera in Brazil, leading to the establishment of the

"Museum of Images of the Unconscious";

The purgative function of Louise Bourgeois's ‘psychological treatment plan’ sculptures;

The Surrealists's comprehension of “Primary Process” and the symbolic language of the Unconscious; and

The hybrid figures and Shape-Shifting fluidity of Shamanic journeying.