PraiseSongs for the Numinous
The greatest visionary art is not about the visionary experience. It is the visionary experience itself. In the process of the making, materials are imbued with the artists' experience.
In the case of this exhibition, PraiseSongs for the Numinous, and these artists presented we had to, as curators, build a familiarity with the artist, the work, and its context in the artists' world to know just where that intentionality was. There are common threads here, but possibly the most common one is that of animism, the belief in spirit contained in organic and inorganic objects.
The alchemical process of earth, water, fire and air is obvious in the ceramists' ouvre. And of course that in itself is not enough to declare an object 'animist'. The curatorial twist we put on this was our need to see the form combine with the intention and process into a place of timelessness. We wanted to show work that moved backwards as well as forward temporally.
Jane Wheeler, Phyllis Sullivan, Tim Rowan, Melanie Ferguson, Monique Rutherford and Sarah Purvey all have that in their work. They all move in the medium of landscape and the rough mathematics of emerging forms. They are not anachronisms. One hundred years from now they will still be contemporary to that time while they contain their ancient animist forces.
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The greatest visionary art is not about the visionary experience. It is the visionary experience itself. In the process of the making, materials are imbued with the artists' experience.
In the case of this exhibition, PraiseSongs for the Numinous, and these artists presented we had to, as curators, build a familiarity with the artist, the work, and its context in the artists' world to know just where that intentionality was. There are common threads here, but possibly the most common one is that of animism, the belief in spirit contained in organic and inorganic objects.
The alchemical process of earth, water, fire and air is obvious in the ceramists' ouvre. And of course that in itself is not enough to declare an object 'animist'. The curatorial twist we put on this was our need to see the form combine with the intention and process into a place of timelessness. We wanted to show work that moved backwards as well as forward temporally.
Jane Wheeler, Phyllis Sullivan, Tim Rowan, Melanie Ferguson, Monique Rutherford and Sarah Purvey all have that in their work. They all move in the medium of landscape and the rough mathematics of emerging forms. They are not anachronisms. One hundred years from now they will still be contemporary to that time while they contain their ancient animist forces.
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