Bliss Hysteria

“I want the act of creating to be meditative and healing, a space in which to still the mind”. The body and the way it can assimilate many meanings and taboos has always inspired Jessica K. Ballantyne. Jessica is specifically interested in subjective experience and how to convey psychological states of mind through the nude female figure. Jessica’s recent series of eleven mixed-media drawings called The Sacred Nude combine the idea of the classical western nude with an uncanny twist: a distortion and doubling of bodies alongside Sacred Geometry, specifically the Flower of Life. The Flower of Life has been a significant symbol throughout history and one that is found in ancient sites all over the world. It has inspired great minds like Leonardo da Vinci and is said to contain within it, the knowledge of the entire universe. After participating in a meditation workshop, Jessica was inspired by a meditative experience, which left her feeling elated and peaceful. The said meditation practice, based on neuroscience and on changing the brain to change habits of thought, was what inspired her to create a series of artwork that would serve as a reminder of that powerful experience: The Sacred Nude. In these pieces, The Flower of Life represents divinity, peace and the true self or subjectivity. The distorted and mirrored bodies were inspired by images of hysteria “I wanted to convey a sense of splitting the ‘self’ from the ‘ego’, of a -division that would not end with two separate entities, but with one. One self that observes the ‘self and the ‘ego’, represented here as The Flower of Life”. Jessica works in a variety of mediums and although painting in oils is one of her most dominant, Jessica wanted to do something different for her series of Sacred Nudes. Usually rendering bodies in very vibrant colours, Jessica chose to neutralise the figures and give them softness with the more transient medium of graphite on paper. She also used wax pencils and metallic spray pa