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Mythopoetic Seeing:
Twenty-Five Years of Photographs by
Elisabeth Sunday
As the daughter of a stained-glass window artist, Elisabeth Sunday spent much of her youth in churches, developing an interest in matters of the spirit. This interest is reflected in the development of her work as a photographer.
In the early 1980s Sunday made still lifes and landscapes that were unique in their stylized abstraction, using a technique known as mirror transfiguration. In her photographs oceans seem to breathe and swell like giant diaphragms and plants grow with accelerated form toward the fantastic. Figures elongate and morph into subtle abstractions of their actual form.
Sunday then began a 25-year quest to photograph religious people of indigenous tribal cultures from five continents, embracing humankind’s belief in the spiritual. Her work extends the long tradition of depictions of the pious, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the Dharmic religions such as Buddhism, Sikhism, and Hinduism, as well as others, such as Daoism.
Sunday attempts to express the unseeable, or what she describes as a kind of “indigenous wisdom.” Recorded in these images are the traditional stories and spiritual beliefs of the people in these diverse cultures. In photographs from locations such as Australia, India, Indonesia, and Thailand and nations of Africa and North America, Sunday shows us how humans celebrate the life of their beliefs.
Elisabeth Sunday’s photographs are included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Cleveland Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery, the Chrysler Museum of Art, among others.
Image:
"Cadence," Tuareg Woman, The Sahara Desert, Mali, 2005.
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