The Spell of the Sensuous
Opening event: 28 October, 2:00PM – 4:00PM
Exhibition dates: Saturday 28 October – December 16 2023
“I found myself caught in a nonverbal conversation with this Other, a gestural duet with which my conscious awareness had very little to do. It was as if my body in its actions was suddenly being motivated by a wisdom older than my thinking mind, as though it was held and moved by a logos, deeper than words, spoken by the Other’s body, the trees, and the stony ground on which we stood.”
David Abram, “The Spell of the Sensuous”
How can painting enhance our habitual ways of seeing our environment? How can it help us reconnect with the animal and plant life around us? How can it help us reconnect with the land that surrounds us? Dependent on the more-than-human natural world, we are, in the words of David Abram, “alive, awake and aware”.
We discover worlds within worlds. We understand nature, wild with its patterns and vicissitudes. We come to the realization that the landscape is expressive and sentient with shapes and sounds twisting, twitching, swerving, switching, rippling and swelling. It interpenetrates our minds, our senses and our humanity.
This sensual world is the place of dreams and yearning where everything is always changing and evolving. How can painting capture the power and energy of these rhythms, flows and forces – the exchange between our senses and the sensuous terrain?
About the artist
Ekaterina Dimieva is an abstract painter based in Tamaki Makaurau Auckland. She completed her Master’s of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts in 2020 and is a participant in the mothermother curatorial project.
Dimieva has been a finalist in the Estuary Art and Ecology Awards (Uxbridge Arts and Culture, 2022, 2023), a finalist in the National Contemporary Art Awards (Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato, 2022) and the Molly Morpeth Canaday Awards (Arts Whakatane, 2021). Her work is included in various collections nation-wide and abroad including the Wallace Arts Trust collection.