Archive

Welcome to Turiya's archives. Here's a glimpse into our past collections. I'm sure if you've been here since the inception of AT, you'll know that in an age of speed and mass output, I have a very slow but intentional process of working. It can take up to a year to have a concept fully in material form. Nothing sacred can be rushed. And to me, art is no different from prayer.

Every collection is thoughtfully crafted to reflect, in a Benjaminian sense, an aura: an unrepeatable presence born of storytelling, myth, ritual, and the authenticity of lived time. Aura lives in the presence of an artwork — the ‘here and now’ that leaves its traces in the object. My offerings come in very small quantities and exist in a continuum of time (past mythologies + present urgencies + future imaginaries). For more on Walter Benjamin, see his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

As a sequel to the previous collection, Fruits of the Moontree, A Tale of Divine Love (2024), incubated on Christmas holiday from Modena to Florence, when I first heard the story, Isabella and the Pot of Basil. In 14th-century Florence, a young unmarried woman, Isabella, engages in a secret love affair with her family's employee, Lorenzo. Her ambitious merchant brothers discover their affair and murder him as a code of honor. Though slain by her brothers, Lorenzo reunites with Isabella in a dream and guides her to his buried body. She exhumes him, hides his severed head in a pot of basil, and waters it daily with her tears until she dies of sorrow. On the surface, this is a tragic love story, but with close reading, the rich symbolism of individuation offers invaluable wisdom to reconcile with the collective energies of 2024.

For generations now, we have grown up in systems of fear, conditional worth, and approval of our family, institutions, community, friends, culture, or religion. Adding to this layer is the regurgitation of information and visuals by the algorithm. Under such systems of control, the psyche splits off the shadow, which results in repeating trauma, escaping it, sedating it, or trying to heal it through others. Similarly, Isabella's choices, her sexuality, and her identity are confined to a system upheld by the Church, family, and culture. It's not until she falls in love with Lorenzo and simultaneously loses him that her individuation process begins.

Throughout the story, she maintains a remarkable fidelity to the Self that enables the psyche to assist her in alchemizing grief. Isabella doesn't go to a priest or a confessor (external authorities) but honors and unites Eros (love) and Thanatos (death) through the pot of basil. The basil pot and her tears demonstrate faith in her psyche's truth. In this devotion, she recognizes love as something eternal and not dependent on her family, culture, or even Lorenzo's life. For us, such self-actualization comes from inner fidelity to who we are and what we love, and how we hold the paradoxes of life that move through us: joy and sorrow, love and death, ecstasy and grief all at once. When an old identity or system collapses, the psyche is forced into a "clearing." Without it, we remain in imposed roles. But when we see through this, the heart opens up, slowly, and magnificently, beneath the layers of ego, to discover that love, so electrical, so terrifying, and yet so utterly mysterious, is the ordering principle of the universe. 


The 2023 collection Fruits of the Moontree (2023), named after Alan Bleakley's phenomenal text "Fruits of the Moon Tree: The Medicine Wheel and Transpersonal Psychology," takes the alchemical practice of turning lead into gold as a metaphor for exploring spiritual and psychological transformation. James Hillman, a Jungian psychoanalyst, has written extensively about this process. For the collective, 2023 into 2024 is the year of descending into the underworld. It's the beginning stages of large-scale tension, aggressive political polarity, and the redefinition of power structures by bringing truth to light. After all, darkness yearns to witness its own beauty. As above, so below. When we magnify into our own lives, it could have been a series of confrontations with addictions, avoidance patterns, perfectionism, generational trauma, consumption habits, breakups, relocations, job losses, and just plain stagnancy. Such an archetypal mutation forces us to refine the Self by letting the old order dissolve. Easier said than done, right? We are creatures of habit, predictability, and unconsciously trail away into familiarity - even though it hurts. But the descent has to be made. By working through the 7 stages of alchemical purification, we open up potential for new spiritual and ecological frameworks by late 2024.