Photo by Alexander Berg

Several principles permeate how I think and make my work. I view it as a marriage of art theory, esoteric philosophy, energy healing bodywork and sound to create situations for a holistic encounter to regenerate our bodies and perceptions. 

Buddhism, meditation, and my practice of Jin Shin Jyutsu, an energy healing art that uses pulse analysis through the fingertips to identify energy patterns influences my work. My study of listening to the pulses of the body led me to learn hand drumming (Cuban percussion) and ceremonial sacred rhythms (Candomble). Joseph Beuys and his ideas of mystically charged materials; Sympathetic Vibration theory by John Keely; and the healing diagrams of the Swiss healer and artist, Emma Kunz are a few of my influences.

I employ abstraction as a means of exploring what I call Tuning Compositional Strategies. My project, "Tuning Scores for the Nervous System" is a visual investigation of the body’s rhythms and patterns, generating collaboration with musicians and their interpretations of the scores. Information carried in the spine creates neural structures where thoughts, attitudes and actions are generated. I'm interested in what that information looks like as it moves in thought patterns and rhythms throughout the body and the interaction with the agency of vital materiality, primarily copper, for its conductive and therapeutic qualities. The nature of substance combined with intention, links copper's physical material properties to the spiritual.

It is through our subjective interaction and connectedness that meaning is felt and constructed. I depend on the viewer to bring generative content to my work. I create a visual physio-philosophical context, for that to happen. I believe the interaction with art depends on a physical sensation to be fully realized in the body while viewing the object "to promote more attentive encounters between people-materialities and thing-materialities."

Kathleen Anderson 2022