The Deities exhibit is a collection of artists who are being touched by extraordinary experiences with Other in dreams, visions, out-of-body or near death experiences, meditations or within a shamanic context. Many of the conversations have evolved over the years and are still going on, changing and transforming the artist’s personal and artistic life, while shaping their talents into right-livelihood.

Please take the time to read the stories of how the deity makes itself known, the struggles of accepting such information and where the prompting of the deity is leading the individual. Perhaps you will remember a time when you received such information, or had an experience you could not define. If so reflect on if you choose to take the direction given, the fears or resistance you may have encountered, and if you did take the guidance, did it transform your life? How? If you do not remember such an experience, perhaps you will be open to the possibility in the future, after experiencing the heart and beauty of the intimate stories revealed here.

It is our hope, that all who are open, will begin to develop relationships with the gods, goddesses, compassionate spiritual beings and nature spirits who inhabit our mother earth and other realms. In creating the art, the artists were asked to quiet their ego and will nature, to simply wait and allow deity to reveal itself. The deity in many instances wanted the art to be different from what the artist first conceptualized. The artist then takes the information, images and dreams given by the deity and contributes their own creativity in the translation into form. In this way, we work in co-creation with the spiritual worlds and heal our earth.

 

Mary McCulloch: Honoring the Mother
Sculpture and mixed media installation

My relationship with Spirit began less than two years ago, when I was fortunate enough to be trying the brew of an analogue of the powerful "vine of the soul" known as Ayahuasca. Grown in regions of the Amazon basin, Ayahuasca is used by local shamans to access visionary or mythological worlds for the treatment of disease or revelation and healing. To be brought to a place that felt much like pure consciousness; breath was my bridge to a deeply expanded sense of myself. What I didn’t expect was to realize how much reverence I felt I now had for the wisdom of the plants and what they were opening me up to. My third ceremony contributed to what has become to date my most powerful encounter with an energy that feels wholly Other. I had the fully physical experience of having a block in my fifth chakra burst open and waves of sound flowing out of me that came from deep down inside. It was as if I experienced a creative rebirth on a core level. I was completely humbled by the sense of what a gift I had received and knew on a deep level; my path would involve work with this plant teacher.

Soon after this, I found an ad and signed up for a shamanic doll-making class taught by Kristena West. My first doll, Eagle Spirit Woman, opened me up to learning the core elements of shamanism and ways to access spiritual realms of existence for healing and guidance. But what it really did was usher in a profound transformational period that I find myself still in the midst of experiencing.

I wish to share with you the experience of being in the presence of the Mother as I’ve experienced her in my work with the plant medicine. The challenge was to create with sculpture something that conveys a felt experience. As my intention was to open to what wanted to come through me, I was surprised to find that the doll became so large. She is a reflection of the potential we all have within.

Nancy Albro: The Dark Angel
Acrylic on Board: $800 Bowls: $175

The Dark Angel came as a vision while I was living in a small county cabin in the woods. I believe the quiet and the wooded hill behind the cabin had something to do with the rich detail of this vision. I wrote in my journal:
" I see the black or dark angel, dressed in black and spun silver. Pearls border the edges and folds of her gown. A band of spun lace and pearls surround her forehead. Her hair is silver, partly bound in braids and partly loose. She carries a sheaf of calla lilies."
After the initial visit, she began to come to me in dreams. After some time, when I finally began to paint her, she revealed herself to me as the Angel who guides one from the body, at death, to the light. For me, the "grim reaper" is a sad image constructed from fear. The Dark Angel has removed this fear from my vision of death. Many months after I finished the painting, she came to me again in a dream, and thanked me for painting her with love and grace.
This painting is so personal, and it has changed my work in extraordinary ways. I have always loved painting angels, but now each one I paint has a divine purpose. The Dark Angel opens me to a spiritual force that flows through me into my paintings. Faith, spirit and soul informs the work as much, or more than surface and medium.