Connections

This work is a search for the connections between the spiritual and the mundane using various religious, spiritual, and ceremonial practices. Beginning with ethnographic research of multiple means of communication, my study led to spiritual and religious groups who often construct vessels of their bodies as a way to build connections with an extraterrestrial force or state of enlightenment through physical and spiritual transformation. Themes of death, worship, repetition, and yearning are standard terms that stretch over various and diverse groups of belief-- which in turn are implemented within the following painted/sculpted works.

Mundane references are abstracted human form, placed comparatively with various representations of the divine and the spiritual. Binding connections, rigid constraints, and sculptural elements are used to express these representations, and in tandem, their relationships. In addition to these representations, private, devotional space, and performative repetition become prominent in the role of representing these connections.

Painting in this series is used as a means to emphasize the role of repetition and habit-forming behaviors in spiritual exercises. By painting in multiples and using complementary brush techniques, this process is replicated, and functions as a means to achieve an idealized object or thought through study and reproduction. I am striving to create a replication of something that cannot be recreated through that medium. Between art-making and asceticism are my examples of spiritual attempts to achieve the intangible.