MY WORK EMERGES AS I BREATHE MYSELF THROUGH THE REALMS OF THE MYSTERY.
The Mystery is too vast to be interpreted yet through stillness it emerges gently as a message that unfolds into a tangible material language. The language is coded into objects, text, installations, performance, ritual, and ceremony. My making is prayer through form as a way to thread the seen and the unseen.
Her Eternal Ceremonial Knives is a response to a multidimensional howl in my heart. Many of us are hearing the call of Gaia, of Creation; to return to balance with the web of life thru knowing the relationships of spirit and form. Mystical ceremonial practices of earth, plant, sound, prayer, interspecies communication, silence are a human birthright. If there was ever a need for a reactivating of the Ancestral Ancient Wisdom embodied in our bones and blood, it is now.
I bow to the precious Wisdom Carriers and Wisdom Teachings that have not been forgotten. I hear the call that there are Indigenous practices that navigate the mystery stored in all of our bones. You have the wisdom of your wise ancestors; who knew the ways of plants, sky, star, animal, soil, the physical and spiritual relationships. These ancestors whose DNA is passed to you, are longing to be with you and in this evolutionary journey with Gaia.
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BIO
Caroline Seckinger is a conceptual and performance artist with a working repertoire of printmaking, drawing, sculpture in metal, fibers, animal skins, bones, feathers, plants, stones, wax; film, and digital media. Seckinger counters this diversification of modalities with a honing of her content, focusing her inquiry fairly specifically on a phenomenon in contemporary social and esoteric discourses. The result is a diverse and ambitious body of (art) work that is increasingly conceptual, intellectual, spiritual and political, and yet unrelentingly lyrical and aesthetic.
Seckinger uses low-tech and ancient skills that are the traditional domain of women’s work (carding, spinning, stitching, knitting, knotting, weaving) and the 6000+ year old art of lost-wax bronze casting and applying these to the most basic human tasks such as making clothing, tools, shelters, nets, containers and vessels. The often repetitive nature of these working practices permeates both the content and the form of the work, much of which is based on serial presentations and narrative expositions. When she ventures into they foundry work of bronze casting she explores the techniques of embedding the mystical into the material. Her high-tech and modern skills as a film-maker and digital graphic artist have been to bear on the same set of materials and themes, viewers are invited to consider the relationships between the domestic and public realm, high and lowcraft, “his and her” work, the known and unknown, the form and formless.
Seckinger uses meditative and ceremonial practices within her making to deepen her conversation with the dimensions of all things.
Seckinger is a graduate of University of Santa Cruz (BFA) and California Institute of the Arts (MFA). She has worked as a community organizer, international activist, investigative reporter, documentary filmmaker, spiritual activist and meditation leader; all which have informed her practice as an artist as a social/spiritual lens. She is the recipient of numerous film awards and artist grants.