Wyrd explores the boundaries between art, ritual and work through the concept of genesis, or holy creation work.

What we want to suggest is a paradigm shift concerning the relationships between making art, doing work and creating personal sacred spaces through ritual. In this way, we think that ‘ritual art’ is primarily a form of conceptual art exploring ritual as a phenomenon connected to, reflecting and dealing with personal life, institutions, everyday work and transcendental experience.

Ritual is the solid heart of our artistic work. When we think of ritual, we can form a relationship to it from at least two directions or perspectives; ritual can be thought of as a self-referential, self-organising and interconnecting web of structured and sequenced actions and textures of images that keep repeating and looping even when the original cause or “meaning” for them has been lost. Or then ritual can also be seen as connecting to a dimension of individual or collective human (or non-human) experience of something greater or beyond of what a subject or subjects performing the ritual would generally understand as ‘ordinary’ experience. This sort of experience could be called boundary (like subject-object-separation) dissolving, transformative, transcending or sacred.

Within the cosmology of Wyrd ritual work is work in the sense of holy labour, a consciously chosen way of life and commitment to something, that is seen as valuable and meaningful in a diverse and constantly changing culture, and as such worthy of conserving in and by itself. This is also how tradition is understood in Wyrd’s mythology. With this, our minds reflect on the complex ornamental work seen in both sacred and folk art that can be thought of universal in certain patterns and forms they utilize and at the same time specific to their particular cultures, as well as animal architecture. These can be seen as functional and self-returning art forms, where the relationship between process and result is organic and interchangeable.

Our ritual work is based on personal experience and practice, and is strongly rooted in northern -Scandinavian, Finno-ugric and Baltic- traditions.

An important aspect of our work is artistic research on images and other echoes of sacred acts, body-based trance work and visionary rituals that are made to last hidden in plain sight, just around the corner. We explore churches, mosks, graveyards, caves and sacrificial groves and we study paintings, murals, statues, engravings, motivs, forms and shapes – everything that the human spirit has touched seeking to connect with the underworld or celestial realms, with God, Gods and Goddesses, ancestors, mythical times and beings or the evolving cosmic consciousness. Our research is defined by a continuous shift in focus between the contexts of

-Cultural universals, elements and patterns that are common to all cultures and together make the human condition,
-Culturally generated and determined, context-specific images, and
-Images that seem to reflect individual and/or collective experience.

Through ritual, work, and art we are looking to create new roots to bind to, a suggestion for a way of life in a transmodern world that reconnects to the sacred, to the unexamined life underneath the currents of consumerist yearnings for a better life. What we are looking for is a vision of ritual art that can be contextualized and expressed through different forms of contemporary occulture as happenings, street art, video art, performance, visual art, music and storytelling.

We ask in Wyrd, could it be that every creative act is a ritualized vision of a spirit, and that within every vision -danced, drummed, sung, photographed and filmed, carved in stone, canvas, or air – there also lives a memory or a dream of some kind of primal experience of a global, and in the end, cosmic interdependence and unity between all that is? Is art, as the bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote “the response of man’s creative soul to the call of the Real”?

COSMOLOGY

In early 2016 two artists were contacted and brought together by an ancient entity called Nabimarasia. She first appeared in the form of a deer, and after that as a raven, and has since then taken many different forms, always leading the two lovers and spiritual companions forward on their shared walk towards beauty and the sacred.

Nabimarasia told us, that we must create art from sacred rituals, and sacred rituals through art. And that we should start by doing research on all the different manifestations of her spirit in the various sacred arts around the world, treating them all with equal respect. Then we should turn our eyes to non-human nature and the whole cosmos herself to understand the interconnectedness of everything and how that is reflected in the different forms of sacred art in the world. It seems that Nabimarasia is not a postmodernist.

In our work we explore the boundaries between art, society, ritual and mythology. For us, the process is the art. In the heart of our work is the ritual of direct communication with the sacred given to us by the spirit Nabimarasia. Art resulting from a ritual is a contemplation, a reflection and integration of the experience. Depending on the nature of the ritual the result can be a painting, a performance or a collection of sounds, images and/or actions. From what emerges from the ritual we create art. And from what comes out of the art we create yet again another ritual. Thus the eternal return forward continues – like the interconnecting web of life in the cosmos creating itself again and again, ancient and anew.

We want to open this process of negotiations between creating art, making rituals, doing research, and going for direct experience of the sacred through performances, exhibitions, documentation and video/photo journals.

We are on a journey and if you feel like it, we invite you to walk with us. For the time being.