The Initiate

● conceptual narrative oil painting series ●

“First. we need to take very seriously the disappearance of ritual processes for initiating … There are carefully constructed rituals…Over the centuries of civilization in the West, almost all these ritual processes have been abandoned or have been diverted”

- King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (Robert Moore and Douglas Gilette)

This series of figurative oil paintings arise from the artist’s experiences, transformations and inner visions, prompted by her own personal sense of initiation following a post-traumatic depression and an in-depth psychoanalytic process that lasted 18 months and involved uncovering her own personal daemons by excavating the depths of her unconscious mind.

“Because of their firsthand experience of the depths, and their recovery…Such people know their way around in the underworld…”

- Goddesses in Everywoman (Dr Jean Shinoda Bolen PhD)

In this series, the artist references allegory, archetypal theory of the unconscious mind, mysticism and the occult to depict her own surreal inner symbolic dreams and visions which guided her through a process of psychological healing.

The resulting metamorphosis of her personality from passive sufferer to autonomous participant in her destiny is an experience that parallels the myth of the Greco Roman goddess: Persephone.

“Persephone the Guide is part of that person's psyche, the archetype responsible for the sense of familiarity the person feels when she encounters symbolic language, ritual, madness, visions, or ecstatic mystical experience.”

Consequently, this series responds to the narrative monumentality of the classical tradition of renaissance mythology painting established by painters such as Titian, Tintoretto and Raphael, but from the perspective of the feminine deity. Deae was also equally influenced by the continuing movement of surrealism which itself draws so heavily from psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious mind:

'Today, so often we belittle or explain away our imagination, our internal world, our soul . Our dreams are seen as an incoherent and random firing of neurons, our thoughts are not symbolic but literal and intrusive -not our own - our mind is a simple chimp. Simultaneously, we are told that we are suffering. Suffering from a ‘meaning-crisis’. And yet, we are encouraged to rely on biochemical interventions as our solution - Silicone Valley rationalists go in search of access to their subconscious through chemical inducement, others are prescribed pills to redress an ‘imbalance’ or numb the suffering of the mind - we seek to transform (or simply block transformation) through material means when true transformation starts in the spirit.

The images in this series of paintings appeared to me spontaneously, I didn’t create them per-se. My unconscious presented the skinless figure to me in a series of incredibly vivid dreams and visions. Rather than arising from psychedelics, this experience emerged, instead, from facing the intensity of my personal existential suffering and allowing it to be transposed into creative energy at a deeply unconscious level. Gradually, through study and contemplation, I was able to understand the significance of this character, this part of myself, and the adversity she was attempting to overcome. I realised that this story was something deeper than one person, that the characters, settings and transformations were somehow more broadly human. Through study, reading and observation, I tracked back their symbolic significance to the Ancient Greek initiation ritual of Eleusis (The cult of Persephone), where a human shaman would ‘become’ a skeleton deep in the cave, and come back to life. I believe that this shaman was a woman - the feminine ‘resurrection’ , symbolising every person’s inner potential to renew and reinvent’

The series will face themes of transformation, loss of innocence, life, death, madness, and existential notions of the deeply seated human longing for meaning, significance and destiny.