| “Voices from the Circle: Women's Ritual Art” combines a storytelling performance with an expressive arts ritual set within a portable, visual art installation. The ritual space is created by 13 panels depicting symbols relating to women's archetypes. The ritual employs expressive arts and storytelling to facilitate individual and collective healing. It is a synthesis of a feminist and shamanic vision of balance and harmony, and blends the visual and the experiential, using verbal sharing, meditation, chanting, art making, and symbolic action to foster group participation. The artist/leader incorporates a performance and analysis of the themes of love in her performance of an adaptation of the fairy tale, “The Twelve Wild Swans.” The exhibit is accompanied by a contextual essay examining the scholarly context for the work. It includes a discussion of the history and evolution of the women's spirituality movement, women's performance art, the origins of symbolism, the sources of the imagery in the panels, the elements of women's ritual art present in the ritual, and the relation of the ritual to healing and empowerment. The images, the story, and the format and ritual content of the ritual are based on four years of modified participatory observer research into healing images and women's rituals. The investigation focused on the practices of three facets of the women's spirituality movement: the Dianic Wiccan movement as expressed in the practices of the Re-Formed Congregation of the Goddess (RCG), the Goddess groups related to the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS), and the pan-Indian spirituality movement. |
