HettienneGrobler: Sacred Pilgrimages 2000-2017

Pilgrim to sacred places

Pilgrimage and sacred ritual is my foremost spiritual practise. Raised Dutch Reformed Protestant, the rich lustre of sacred and holy places offered a well of inspiration for my parched soul. My travels have taken me to many different religions, cultures and traditions. You will see on the internet that I have written on many aspects of the spiritual journey. Until I came into contact with the mystical side of Christianity. My first ritual I attended was the festival of Archangel Michael in Mont Sant'Angelo in Italy, then visiting Padre Pio. Then followed walking the pilgrimage of Bridgid, the sacred well and labyrinth in Kildare, Ireland. And that is when my art appeared in the form of paintings. Ritual grounded in the knowing of the unconscious, awakens us from the dream of habitual seeing and thinking. The conscious mind lacks the ability or maybe the neural pathway to communicate the new-found wisdom intellectually, and thus the expression through art steps in. Well, that is only my experience and understanding, of course. But I had not been an artist till I participated in sacred ritual.

My stay at Lourdes and participating in the rituals daily, turned me into a full time artist.

When one participates in a ritual (probably any ritual, but when you regard it as sacred, you add a certain 'light' to it) you are transported into a different time and space : colors are different; the light is different; everything has meaning and the ordinary become extra-ordinary. My art novena for Lourdes in particular, highlights my statement that our lives are the altar to the Divine and I strive to capture that numinosity of the sacred ritual in my photographs and altars. I only started creating sacred altars on my return from Lourdes. These small shadowboxes are vignettes, a moment in time in the life of ordinary human beings, lifted out of the mundane into the numinous, merely by seeing life as sacred.

The Mysteries of Mary Tarot

The Sacred Mysteries of Mary, the myth and the metaphor of the Madonna as a wisdom path, as reflected in the archetypal Book of Tarot. 78 Hand crafted shrines to be published as a deck of cards. Walking the four paths of Beauty, Compassion, Truth and Wisdom. Each card is an individual shrine dedicated to an archetype, an initiation, a Mystery in the Great Mystery and a vignette of one of the stories woven into this tapestry of Mary. When you read them together, one after the other, laid out in a sacred dance of meaning and insight, they become a garland of roses, a rosary of cards, creating a sacred Rose Garden.

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Sacred Pilgrimages 2000-2017

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