Rituals of Embodied Knowing

The exhibition Rituals of Embodied Knowing brings together ten established artists with diverse forms of practice that engage plants, video, sound, movement, painting, drawing, and installation. These artists have been working together with an academic group on the project ‘Spiritual Understanding in a Secular Age: Engaging Art as Religious Ritual’, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust.

The project conceptualises art-making as a form of knowledge or understanding that aims to make contact with various aspects of reality such as the natural world, human history, and our individual selves, thus considering how art-making practices in a secular context might, when seen in this way, share similarities with religious ritual.

Academics from a variety of fields such as history, anthropology, psychology, sociology and theology, have identified how key dimensions of each of these practices – movement, time, media, subtraction, invention, and attention – are also leveraged in religious rituals to make contact with reality.

The project calls on us to see art-making in a new way, and has also challenged academics to see aspects of reality in new ways through engaging art-making itself as a means of knowing and understanding. This exhibition invites viewers to consider whether and how the works included could be thought about as ritual-like in their unique ways of employing embodied experience.

This exhibition also launches the new CBONE Gallery, combining the previous Eastgate Gallery and Chapman and Bailey project space into one entity that will show a range of contemporary visual art.

Joining the project artists, Heather Hesterman, Adam Lee, Louise Weaver, Dominic Redfern, Harry Nankin, Chris Bond, Peter Ellis, Mark Newbound, Live Particle, and Sarah Tomasetti, are Yolngu artist Djirrirra Wunnumarra and emerging artist Uma Christensen.

An edited volume of essays emerging from the project will be published in 2024.

Exhibition Dates: 18 February – 18 March 2023.

Where: CBONE Gallery, 1C Marine Parade, Abbotsford, Melbourne.

Live Particle (Angela Clarke and Camilla Maling) will be presenting a series of Soma Scores using their unique sensory objects to generate embodied experience on Saturday 11 March.

There will be a discussion panel and closing event on Saturday 18 March.