Sewell’s works explore relationships between form, colour, light, space, aroma, and sound contributing to conversations on connections between abstraction and spiritual experience. The work seeks to evoke the unfathomable mystery and beauty of cosmic phenomena, and act as a potential threshold into the terrain of the numinous*. The exhibition includes the use of spherical and circular forms in painted, sculptural, and photographic works that reflect artist Karen Sewell’s interest in celestial bodies and sacred geometries.

Capturing what Cannot be Captured was inspired by symbolic motifs in prints of 15th century Jesuit artists who depicted circular orbs, natural light-giving bodies, cosmic or celestial to signify the divine. This motif can also be found in a 16th century painting by Johannes Vermeer, who was inspired by these earlier artists.                   

Sewell’s foregrounding of the everyday materials in the construction of her works, also suggests moments of access between the material and the intangible. Paintings are made from pigments, local Whakatū Nelson soil, thousand-year-old water drawn from a North Island natural spring, and binder medium. Sewell makes the paint herself using natural and synthetic pigments, soil, powdered marble, and binder medium. 

Sewell’s interest in levitation, a quality suggested by her suspension of forms appearing to hover in space, is influenced by ideas of ascension and transcendence, and conduits between the material and ethereal realms. She aspires to draw viewers’ attention to look and think beyond the material – and into the realm of feeling – to experience the possibilities of wonder. View the exhibition works here.