ARTIST STATEMENT
I create sculptures and site-specific installations that explore and rediscover the ancient and sacred relationship between the human spirit and the natural world. My artwork is inspired and sustained from the experience of beauty and truth, which I feel through intimate relating and while creating art and ritual with the natural world. An important element and often the initial stage in my creative process are conversations with trees and earth elements during excursions and adventures in nature. I use found and gathered earth materials from these excursions which inspire and initiate a meditative and sensual creative process of art making that opens into the timeless. Revealing and honing these found natural materials with a craft-based physicality and a devotion to the spirits in nature has become an embodied artistic and spiritual practice, one which opens gateways and passages to new experiences and possibilities.
My art making process, which has evolved over many years of practice melds craft and technique, aesthetics and gesture, art and design which I weave together and use as a structure to explore the border between the form and the formless. My emphasis on creating and revealing beauty and the quality of form and gesture is intended as an opening and gateway between and into the realm of spirit and the formless. Collaborations and teachings have become another strong orientation in my work, as well as working in local environments and communities to foster and encourage communal and collective artwork. Honoring, restoring and protecting Planet Earth and our natural environment is a central theme in my artistic practice. Having worked with and through catastrophe, destruction and loss, particularly in the Valley Fire of 2015 in northern California, and the resulting painful and ongoing loss of trees and nature has given my work greater depth and understanding for the need to become aware and responsible towards nature and our planet.
As an artist I am interested in an ongoing conversation and creative collaboration with the natural world made visible and expressed through sculpture, photography, ritual and performance. In sharing my art I desire and intent to invoke a sense of intimacy, belonging and oneness with nature, and to contribute to a sacred ecology and a shared vision of a new world that is emerging at this time.
-Marcus Maria Jung
“The sculptural work of Marcus Maria Jung embodies the ancient and sacred relationship between the human spirit and the natural world. Today, preserving the quality of the natural world has taken on an urgency of monumental proportion and forms a crucible for the human condition.
Jung’s work explores issue’s of environmental & social justice. Frequent themes include sacred geography & ecology, human rights and earth based ritual, indigenous wisdom traditions, and the role of ancient archetypes in the formation of human identity.
Jung’s sculpture and installations bridge the tradition of Land Art from the 1960-70’s, known in the works of Andy Goldsworthy, David Nash and Richard Long, with the spiritual consciousness of the 21st century. At the forefront of an emerging art movement defined by some as the Eco-Arts movement and by others Neo-Spiritualism, Marcus Maria Jung is part of a new wave of artists and creatives dedicated to healing the planet through artistic practices.”
