| Art-making gives form and image to soulful healing. This dissertation explores this parallel journey of transformation. The art studio transforms to a mythic and meaningful arena when understood as a sacred recreation of the cosmos.;This study explores how the interaction between the primary elements, water, earth, air, and fire facilitates creativity. Furthermore, the unifying principle of creative activity in the ceramic studio results in a continual vacillation between order and chaos. The edges between artist and work blur as the artist dances between the roles of malleable mud-woman and stubborn ceramic-statue wary and resistant to change. The miracle of change, in the soul and in the art, inspires deep reverence.;This work broadens an understanding of how the psyche is fed by image. Ambivalence and paradox in both beautiful and hideous images demonstrates the need to hold with opposite poles, value the unexpected, and to pay attention to detail. During the years devoted to this project the artist found herself particularly and mysteriously drawn to the making of three-sided figures. Only gradually did she realize how these triple images represented the power of the feminine. She discovered that bringing together the perspectives of hermeneutical interpretation, phenomenological awareness, and philosophical reverie yielded a kaleidoscopic vision of the psyche that simultaneously holds both introversion and extroversion.;Myths, arriving in the form of dream, story, poem, hymn, and tale, provide the symbols that inspire and materialize images during the ceramic process. One also recognizes an inner calling to do, to make, to explore, to observe, to listen, and to imagine a center that is connected to all beings. Tolerating and seeking the unknown across formerly uncharted chaotic territory to a liminal threshold, necessarily revises the concept of a preordained or predestined pilgrimage.;The process of working with clay packs a powerful punch that propels one into an inner world filled with remembered failures, insecurities, and frustrations. Connecting to the present moment, to our own past, to the myths of other cultures, and the arriving multiple images provides the springboard for a leap through the hoop of fire into a new perspective. |
