| Born in Germany in 1960, Medea holds a Masters Degree in Fine Art; she has exploited virtually every medium, painting in acrylic, tempera, watercolour and mixed media, and creating sculpture using objet trouvé. Her work presents mythological themes, derived both from the ancient world and from her innate personal cosmology - an abstract encoded symbolism visualized and conveyed through spontaneous expression. Since 1980 Medea has worked in the German art collective AARON hosting group shows twice a year, the members' work dealing mainly with subconscious and psychic themes. She also holds regular solo exhibitions, collaborates with several other art groups, and since 1992 has taught watercolour painting at the German College of Further Education. The development of her work has been continually influenced and enriched by association with other explorers in the shamanic-spiritual dimension; this has included her playing in an all-female drum group, ritual work with a prominent witch coven, contact with the international Sufi movement, as well as a decade-long intensive psycho-magical collaboration with Jan Fries (author of Visual Magic and other influential books) and Astrid Bauer (whose work also appears in the gallery). For many years she has pursued her individualistic path, guided by deep immersion in dreaming from which emerge her patterns of myth, mapped and recorded in diaries, drawings, and through her painting. 'Visual processes are happening at every moment in dream and daydream - in all of us, all of the time. Civilised modern humans have cut themselves off from the "holy spirit", the god-like creature inside, from true dreaming and the religio - the remembered singularity of Self. The dream-gates are blocked or dreams are seen as a disturbing chaos, if not completely pushed aside. My artistic work begins at that point where the unconscious, the deep mind, takes over - no matter if this state is achieved through dreaming, meditation, trance or phantasie in astral travelling. The conscious parts will be occupied with deciding on the materials which will express, and with transmitting. The unification which results is experienced as a special mystique; one-ness, which allows us to tap the primal source of creativity, existing beyond style, critique, and the standard expectations conditioned by society. This inner knowledge unfolds within the individual's freely-flowing talents, creating new possibilities beyond the profit-orientated modern society, limited as it is by its rejection of deep feelings and desires.' |