The Journey of the Dancing Spirits is an immersive sound and sculpture installation that brings the viewer on a journey through the ‘Brainscape’, a mental landscape representing the subconscious mind. Invoking an ancient history and cultural past, the Dancing Spirits are ancestral figures acting as guardians, guiding the viewer through the tumultuous experience of the modern mind. The Dancing Spirits bring Kabbalistic ideas around creation and the soul into the material world, anchoring them within destruction, in a reference to generational trauma haunting present-day experiences.
The sculptures rise out of the rubble of industrial destruction, echoing a paradoxical conflict, moving towards a future whilst memorialising the past. The Spirits stand as esoteric symbols on the borderline of an eternal limbo, reminiscent of ancient Semitic calligraphic language, created through automatic drawing and gestural mark-making. In the scarred landscape that is formed lies the struggle between ideas of finite, temporal beings and the infinite nature of the soul that lives beyond death. The viewer is invited into this liminal space between past and present and encouraged to think about their inner conflict, past, and heritage and the methods in which they connect to this history and carry it with them on their own mental and spiritual journey.
Isali Arielle is a multimedia artist whose practice spans printmaking, sculpture and immersive installation with the aim of creating an entrancing, overwhelming environment that disorientates and hypnotises the viewer. Her practice explores themes of identity and trauma and is characterised by gestural, calligraphic mark-making. Working in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms, she creates narratives that move beyond the page and into a physical space to interact with the viewer.
The Dancing Spirits stand in eternal limbo amidst the ruins of industrialised destruction. On the borderline of the physical and the infinite. They morph into an ancient code. Torn between two worlds, a battle between the finite and the infinite.