On Tuesday, April 29, at 6 pm, join Sonia Weber Gilkey with Carl Little for an artist talk about Gilkey’s current exhibition, Infinite Light.
Infinite Light is a retrospective of sculptural works in various media by Dutch born artist and Maine summer resident, Sonja Gilkey. Gilkey's work is inspired by outsider art she encountered while earning her MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and informed by a lifelong and deeply felt connection to nature, especially the sea. It is infused with her spiritual attunement to eternal cycles of birth, death, and rebirth and to humankind's interconnectedness with the universe in its entirety. Her sense of wonder of the natural world and sensitivity to the oneness of being is informed and made keener by her decades-long practice of kundalini yoga. In Hinduism, Kundalini refers to a powerful, dormant and divine feminine energy, symbolized as a coiled serpent at the base of the spine. Through practices like yoga, meditation, and mantras, this powerful life force energy can be activated, leading to spiritual awakening and enlightenment. Sonja has taught Kundalini since 1974, and its energy permeates all she does. In her words, It is my life and my life’s work in sculpting art. Through Kundalini one experiences intuitively ‘I am I am I am.’
Sonja's rope sculptures embody the concept of kundalini in the material's serpentine form and the braided or coiled structure of each individual rope, and also in the complex web of interconnections formed by knotting and weaving multiple ropes together. The artist's process is meditative and highly intuitive. Though primarily abstract, some of her objects incorporate references to traditional Hindu symbology associated with kundalini, in their more literal representations of chakras and sensual aspects of the human anatomy.
Our infinity on earth is the manifestation in my sculptures. My rope sculptures are practical, sensual, meditative, and infinite. The sculptures can be handled and transformed for manifestations of change. Rope is universal and used in all aspects of life. The interwoven pattern of rope is symbolic of the DNA strands that make up our infinite life. It is essential for infinity, life, death, and rebirth. These rope sculptures represent the infinite universe of reincarnation.
For Sonja, rope is not only an apt metaphor for kundalini imagery, but also a nod to her lifelong love of sailing, and her respect and affinity for the courage and resilience of the fishermen and fisherwomen she lives among in Boothbay. She pays homage to those who died at sea through her Fisherman's Cross series, which she crafts from reclaimed sailing materials, fishing gear, seashells and feathers. The reclaimed materials also reflect her intense concern for the damage humankind has wrought on our oceans, through pollution and climate-driven warming and acidification, on which she opines as follows: My hope is that my works raise consciousness and awareness about how humanity’s DNA is deeply interconnected to that of the oceans and how the beauty and fragile nature of the oceans needs to be protected and celebrated.