January O’Hara
www.acmealtars.com
I’m an Altar Artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I started off as a ceramist throwing pots and building slab construction sculptures. As I developed my skills I began to incorporate other materials; textiles, metal, wood and plastics into my clay. As it turned out the “other materials” began to take over and I realized that it didn’t really matter to me what the materials were, the objects that grew out of what ever the material was seemed to take on a life of it's own. Over the last 20 years I have moved away from clay (although I still love it) and have taken to the art of Assemblage. Think 3-dimensional collage and the Altars grew on from there.
Altars for me became the art of creating sacred objects that helped me to honor the mundane events of life. I can't help but examine how my own habits, thoughts, feelings—way of life in general has a way of boomeranging back to me. These Altars have a way of mirroring back to me and probing my own unconscious areas of my life. I often don’t have much clarity of the meaning of these altars until I have completed the process of building them. It is then that I am able to stand back and see something new and different through a symbolic language that weaves a pathway into those places of my mind buried in the unconscious…a experience of something internal going on that I previously had no awareness of. This is where the true healing power of art reveals its sanctity.
This act of creating takes time, something we all have, want more of and waste more of than we care to admit. So it's not a quick and easy process, but rather requires a dedication to become much more inner directed to finding our truest self and soul.
Forbidden Fruit
Medium:
Size: