Art as Resurrection.

Weaving Emotional Landscapes in the Realm of the Uncanny...

Art offers us the chance for rebirth. Through the corridors of creativity, we emerge, adorned with wisdom and clutching insights that are fundamentally important to our lives. These echoes of our artistic journey are essential reflections of the sacrifices we make during the creative process.

One outstanding aspect of artistry, which never loses its innate sacredness, is that we remake ourselves when we harness the power of imagination. As a furnace, we use our trauma as fuel to burn brightly enough to forge our ideas into artefacts. These artefacts exist as material or psychic constructs—symbols of emotional experiences with the power to alter the world they inhabit through the overlap between the viewer (audience) and the performer (creator).

Artists with extensive experience will attest to the sentience they witness in projects created in this manner, in the collaborative act between the artist, participant, and the sacred and divine. In Japanese folklore, "tsukumogami" are objects that come to life after existing for 100 years. These sentient objects can take various forms, such as household items or musical instruments, and are often said to have the power to tell stories about their previous owners or the history of their surroundings. This unique concept of storytelling reflects the belief that objects can hold memories and that stories can be passed down through generations in unexpected ways.

Over the last five years, I have been working on a book, parts of which I have shared here. I don't tend to engage in rituals unless I have received a clear signal from spirit, intuition, the sacred or divine, or a swirling combination of all these facets of experience.

The divine ritual is complicated by the fact that the book explores prime facets of my work that are fundamental to how I collaborate and communicate. Considering ritual art to be mythic complicates the basic toil required to turn the soil. The sacred exists in every breath we take, and it is not helpful to banish its presence in the realm of myth. I would suggest this is one of the fundamental symptoms of the industrial age. We have stripped the world of wonder and cursed our bodies and minds as we sought to profit from the portals through which we communed with the pleroma.

It's not helpful to float above a landscape we're trying to earnestly and authentically collaborate with, especially when that landscape is built from the raw emotions of wonder and love, pain and suffering. And neither is it useful for a landscape to hover above, existing perpetually as a form of heaven we're wishing into existence. The truth of our interaction with divinity is that the communion is ongoing and exists in the totality of our experience—in the gasps of revelatory ecstasy as much as in the blood, sweat, and tears of material existence. We are all agents of heaven, our imagination contains the angelic principalities, and our hearts house the legions of hell.