Visual Magic
Meet four visual artists who create magical healing and revealing experiences!
In my spiritual tradition, Trika Shaivism, this alive, aware reality is called the Artist and the Magician. Its art is all beings, all worlds, and all circumstances. The artists featured here weave complex visual and narrative conversations that invoke spirit, ancestors, and our many homes, histories, and lineages to reveal and heal.
Idrîs Olábòdé
Ceramist, story teller, healer: Lagos, Nigeria
Idrîs Clay IG
Clay of Lagos Etsy
Idrîs, a passionate ceramic artist from Nigeria, finds the essence of life in the interplay of clay and creativity. His work reflects the beauty of imperfections and the healing power of art. Through his hands, clay transforms into narratives, bridging cultures and connecting souls. Embracing the philosophy that every piece carries a story, Idrîs weaves tales of resilience and hope in the delicate curves of his pottery.
“In the silent dance between the Potter’s hands and the spinning wheel, I found the profound philosophy that underpins healing. Just as clay yields to the hands that mold it, we too must surrender to the shaping forces of life. Our scars, like the seams of imperfectly thrown pots, tell tales of resilience and the art of rising from shattered pieces.
In every wobble of the spinning wheel, in every crack that appears as clay transforms, there lies a lesson. It’s not about the flawless creation, but the courage to keep shaping, to keep throwing, even when the world feels like a relentless storm. Just as pottery demands patience, healing demands time. It’s the art of rebuilding, of stitching together the broken fragments with gold-threaded hope.
Every depressed soul is like raw clay, waiting to be transformed. We must remember that even in our brokenness, there is strength. The Potter doesn’t discard the clay that collapses; instead, each collapse is an opportunity for rebirth. Just like a vessel emerging from the Potter’s hands, we too can rise anew.”
~ Idrîs Olábòdé
Sumakshi Singh
Painter, sculptor, interventionist: Delhi, India
Sumakshi’s website
@sumakshisingh IG
Sumakshi Singh creates interactive installations, paintings, drawings, embroideries, and sculptures. She is an artist, curator, writer, and educator who has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lectured at Oxford University and Columbia University among other institutions. Her work has been featured in galleries and museums around the world.
Breath Song is a symphony of 108 breath sounds specific to and recorded in Squamish, British Columbia accompanied by a video projected on a transparent screen placed in nature. The video displays words related to breath (chosen by the 108 participants) created by the condensing of their breath vapours on glass and appearing in a sequence to form a poem.
“My work constantly traverses the lines between Metaphor, Reality and Illusion and ranges from plays on space-time theories to cultural, historic and physical critiques of place, done in paintings, interactive installations, sculpture, video and performance.
My recent projects involve drawing out, assembling and even weaving illusions of a perceived space, object or another time on top of the pre-existing objects and architecture of a chosen space, until from one vantage point the actual space is completely obliterated by the perceived.”
As viewers step away from the specified viewing position and enter the installation, the objects break into strange shapes, stubbornly fighting the architecture and retaining angles of a now-inaccurate perspective, generating a space-time hiccup. A contradictory co-existence of the real and virtual begins.”
~Sumakshi Singh
Jackie Tileston
Painter: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
My paintings investigate the contemporary sublime and states of being. There is a constant flux between atmospheric and graphic, abstract and figurative, quiet and chaotic forces. I do not find a conflict between meaning and visual opulence, between commercial culture and content. I am interested in the challenges of trying to forge a pictorial landscape in which anything could be included, but that seems to possess its own logic.
I’ve learned that it’s worth being stubborn about protecting my freedom, curiosity, and joy.
I use abstraction as an invitation to be receptive to the unseen, to encourage the viewer towards slowness and away from naming. Abstraction can suspend the viewer in that space of unknowing for just a little longer.
Erik Jacobsen
Painter, tatooist: Seattle, Washington
Erik’s website
Mindless Manifestations IG
I became passionate about art making from a very early age. A place of refuge and contemplation, that encouraged me to turn over ideas in visual ways allowing for intuitive integration and learning. A mix of meditation and exploration, my work is infused with spiritual and philosophical inquiry. Asking questions has always been a primary driver in my life, and various contemplative traditions have been parallel and complementary to my artistic process.
In 2008 I began a career in Tattooing which led me to drop representational figurative painting in pursuit of a medium in which one could express deeper, felt experiences. Tattooing allowed me the unique capacity to ‘converse with the canvas’ and have actual dialogue with my work. A reflective dialogue which would end when my work/client got up and walked out the door. It showed me a necessity to let go of the work and see that my integrity as an artist could be carried with it. This illuminated my needs for better communication skills, radical honesty, empathy and symbolic and historical knowledge, plunging me deeper into Meditation, Sacred Painting, Language, Culture and Art History.
The last twelve years of study has taken me deep within and exposed me to the core of my art making process and from it I have learned to look honestly at myself and use my art process as a reflective tool for the integration of experience.
The majority of the Mandala series represents my exploration into Non Duality and the connection of Art as Inquiry. By dissolving the subject/object divide I began to discover that my Art practice is truly a process of healing and becoming Whole. Each piece is an artifact of a process of self discovery that peeled away another layer of separation, a process of liberation that truly never ends.
~Erik Jacobsen
Wow, just wow! All of these artists create such beauty, they really draw you in yet expand the view to the whole universe.
These artist’s statements. So potent. Each. To chew on