Anadiomeni Series
As an artist and resident at the Skopelos Foundation for the Arts in Skopelos Greece, the muse arrived for Erin McGuiness’ body of work, Anadiomeni. Exploring themes of the natural world, mystical experience and the remembrance of ancestral wisdom. These works whisper of truths we know in our bones, the desire to strip away what is temporal, ephemeral and seek core truths. Remnants of what remains after years of exposure to sun, wind, water the weathering of life. McGuiness’ pieces made from clay and found objects feel excavated, discovered rather than built, referencing bone, vertebrae, pelvis, driftwood; objects that are at once part of the natural world and are a world onto themselves. Sculptures as prayers, symbolic records of communion with the source of life.
This series articulates a deeper and more personal story, one that expresses the artists devotional practices to the earth and art as a process of enactment and remembrance for ancestral wisdom. In turn, these sculptures reference a reverence for the elements; earth, water, fire, air and space. Ultimately the sculptures provide a locus or quiet place where viewers are invited into their own personal form of communion.