by Margaret Lindsey, MFA

editor & curator of artransforms.com

The question really is, WHEN is art transformative? Artmaking, whether it is performative, written, visual, or aural, is transformative when it functions as potent prayer, meditation, or as a tool for local and non-local inquiry and healing. It literally changes bodies, minds, and place, and it creates.

We know art functions beyond words, allowing a deeper level of self-exploration and reflection to engage other sensing systems beyond the conscious mind. It is an ancient, intuitive, explorative way of connecting with source that all humans used to do naturally. Transformative artmaking is a process, a way of seeing within. The goal is to allow the art to arise, without judgement, as a language, a residue of the practice of deep inquiry. Artmaking is the engagement with expression, it is the vehicle that allows information that is often unconscious or undeveloped to be acknowledged and dialogued with. This process is equally generative for all skill levels, you don’t have to be a great artist to make great transformative art.

Art has always been a natural sacred language for humans. Throughout time the arts have functioned as living, somatic prayer, as our creative sacred process for connecting with the divine. A quick review of just a few sacred human art practices covers virtually all ways we create: ritual and ecstatic dance, sacred music, architecture such as mosques, temples and churches, poetry, sacred geometry, calligraphy, chanting, masks, costumes, ancient cave paintings, mandalas and tanka painting, drumming, labyrinths, sculptures of all sizes and media and painting of all kinds. These acts of aliveness and connection have been our way to touch what is divine within ourselves, and beyond ourselves.

I was inspired to put this website together by recent intention work that has arisen in my own and in friends’ studios, by creative intention practices I’ve developed for groups, by the work of my always astonishing students and clients, and by printed pieces I’ve put out to the public.