A creative imaginary for personal and cultural change explored through a feminist spirituality and women's textile art

The research is an arts-based project that investigates the influence of visual imagery and symbolism on ways of seeing as ways of knowing: that is, their influence on perceiving and perceptions. It explores these interactions in deep connection to place - the Southern Hemisphere, specifically the mid-east coast of Australia, and outside the usual constrictions of Western religio-cultural constructs. Involving women in creative processes and taking a gendered position on experience as an intentional basis of knowledge formation, the inquiry aims to ‘make visible’ (re-vision) experiences of creativity as spirituality, usually considered to be invisible because individual and subjective. It suggests that the creative process offers the opportunity for unfolding an autonomous, self-defined consciousness of the divine in the world arising from relation to place, and experienced as an auto-chthonic, reciprocal act of self-in-Creation. Three interrelated activities provided the material and mythical ground for the process of knowledge creation on three levels: the personal, communal and societal, all explored through the medium of textile art. The eight festivals of the Wheel of the Year revered by the indigenous peoples of Europe were personally re-visioned for their relation to a Southern Hemispheric cycle in a series of art quilts and in ten workshops for women in the creation of textile art through seasonal ritual for the Wheel of the Year. Four public exhibitions of art quilts were held to explore the cyclic process of Creation from another aspect: that between art as visual communication and its reception by the viewer (see Appendices). Celebrating and re-storying prehistoric indigenous spiritual practices revived in and for place, and creating art intentionally has revealed a re-fabrication of spiritual consciousness: a new-archaic imaginary for creativity and spirituality as embodied and embedded in Nature’s rhythms. Experienced as cyclic yet transformative, the research revealed an original, personal engagement in the Mystery as a complementarity of opposites: the reciprocity of dark with light, of death as renewal, of self as other. It gave rise to perceptions that re-integrated culturally induced ways of seeing and knowing, through indicating the possibility of an ‘imaginary of re-turn’ to direct perceptions of participation in Creation: one identifiable as an authentic, autonomous way of seeing/knowing – where such consciousness is sourced by being in relationship, to self as woman, local Earth rhythms and All-that-is-other