Online: January 27 to March 9, 2023

Acrylics, Oils and Mixed Media in the Mezzanine

My recent work focuses on alchemy, Hermeticism and the rich symbolism associated with these practices. This symbolism appears in my spiritual and meditative practices, and their potency takes my work in intriguing new directions.

Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung viewed alchemy as the path from ancient Gnostic wisdom to a modern understanding of the unconscious.[1] Jung suggested that alchemy was not merely about laboratory processes to discover the elixir of life or the Philosophers’ Stone, but it was also a metaphysical process concerned with the development of the soul.

During my artistic process, I enter an intuitive and exploratory dialogue with each piece. I “speak” with the images that appear to me and with my materials about my intentions, and I allow the qualities of the materials and the “voice” of the image attempting to manifest to help me shape the piece. For me, this imaginal practice is the cultivation of the soul.

I view art and the making of art as a metaphor for how humans make tangible our “self” in the world and how we open our soul and communicate with the numinous. The pieces in this exhibition are gateways, passages, indicators of liminal space, invitations to mystery, markers of an inner terrain, and some of the symbols encountered along the way. These works may be viewed as meditations or as explorations of the layers of being. They make visible what is invisible and show glimpses of the flow of life embedded in a matrix of relationships to other humans, animals and plants, to stones and the stars.

www.louisebunn.com

[1]  Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. US, Important Books, 2013 p. 201.