The Sacred Mundane is an ongoing body of work that explores the idea of every day objects and scenes as being sacred sites. The act of seeing and interacting with the world because more ritualized. How do we make ourselves more curious, more open to beauty, more reverent or enchanted with the everyday moments of our lives? Artificial objects, consumerism, the mise en scène of Capitalism are an inescapable reality for many of us; to feel a lack of beauty or sacredness in the scenes that make up our daily lives is normal. This body of work asks us to take a second look, to expand our definitions of beauty and the sacred.

By using the  motifs and designs typically associated with religious art of the Middle Ages, I hope to underscore the idea of the Sacred Mundane. My use of the designs of this period is an intentional reclamation of the Pagan archetypes and beliefs that were demonized by the Catholic church starting around 500 AD and taken to an extreme during the 1400 and 1500s. In the late Middle Ages, the Christian church systematically dismantled Pagan practices across the Indo-European continent, building the foundation for colonization through its consolidation of power and homogenization of beliefs. In the Western world, contemporary standards around beauty, rules about what is divine and what is not, an emphasis on individual deliverance over communal reciprocity are all the inheritance of this consolidation of power. My intent is to draw attention back to the objects, landscapes, creatures of our everyday lives and ask the viewer to reassess the value they’d previously assigned to it–to find enchantment, maybe even the divine, in the Earthly and the Ordinary.