Image 3: Nuno Rodrigues de Sousa. Images 4 and 5: Isabel Brisson.
I was invited to participate in ‘Spirit Wave’ curated by Cassandra Hard-Lawrie at Art Space on the Concourse, Chatswood:
“A Willoughby City Council curated group exhibition, Spirit Wave explores spirituality in a diverse and complex contemporary world. It looks at how artists interpret ideas around spirituality and create their own hybridised expression of the spiritual. Or how they challenge and redefine the official structures and institutions that represent spirituality. Spirit Wave considers the spiritual space as one of creativity and fluidity and how it drives values and yearnings. The exhibition examines the diversity of spiritual experience within a multi-cultural society and arts sector, as well as the relevance of spiritual expression through an atheist lens. Through the mediums of installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, textile and photography, the artists in Spirit Wave present unique and individual notions of how spirituality can be articulated and create new dialogue around the legacy of spiritual traditions.”
My contribution to the exhibition included a new work, From the Deep Waters of Sleep (2023) alongside an existing work, video documentation of my performance Pietà (2022). As part of the public program I presented two live performances: Pietà and Emergency Blankets (Appliqué).
I wrote the following text for the exhibition catalogue:
“Pietà is an exploration of spiritual longing and its possible roots in early childhood experiences of the mother. The title of this work references the traditional religious scene in which the Virgin Mary is depicted cradling the body of Jesus after his death. In traditional Christian art, Mary is typically clothed in blue, a colour which has spiritual significance for many different religions, representing the vast expanse of sky and the unfathomable depths of the ocean. In a letter to Sigmund Freud, French writer and mystic Romain Rolland coined the phrase ‘oceanic feeling’ to describe a spiritual experience of timeless unity with the cosmos. Freud was sceptical of religious sentiments and argued that the ‘oceanic feeling’, if it exists, is a remnant of the primordial relationship between the preverbal infant and the all-encompassing figure of the mother.
“From the Deep Waters of Sleep builds on my previous works Pietà and Tehom [the Deep] exploring the links between modernist abstract art and spirituality as well as the connection between water, the mother, and spirituality. The dimensions of this work evoke the liturgical hangings (paraments) that adorn the altar and its surroundings in many Roman Catholic churches. The title is taken from a poem written in 1975 by Reverend Johanna Adriana Ader-Appels after she experienced a premonition of her son’s death. Johanna’s son, Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, was attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean alone as part of a performance titled In Search of the Miraculous. As she had foreseen, Bas Jan did not complete his journey and is presumed lost at sea. Johanna wrote, ‘What are we in the infinity of oceans and sky? A small baby at the breast of eternity’.”
The room sheet, exhibition catalogue and my opening night speech are available at the Willoughby Council webpage for the exhibition.
Tom Isaacs 