The exhibition Rituals of Embodied Knowing brings together ten established artists with diverse forms of practice that engage plants, video, sound, movement, painting, drawing and installation. These artists have been working together with an academic group on the project “Spiritual Understanding in a Secular Age: Engaging Art as Religious Ritual”, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust. The project conceptualizes art-making as a form of knowledge or understanding that aims to make contact with various aspects of reality such as the natural world, human history and our individual selves, thus considering how art-making practices in a secular context might, when seen in this way, share similarities with religious ritual. Academics from a variety of fields such as history, anthropology, psychology, sociology and theology, have identified how key dimensions of each of these practices — movement, time, media, subtraction, invention and attention— are also leveraged in religious rituals to make contact with reality. The project calls on us to see art-making in a new way and has also challenged academics to see aspects of reality in new ways through engaging art-making itself as a means of knowing and understanding. This exhibition invites viewers to consider whether and how the works included could be thought about as ritual-like in their unique ways of employing embodied experience.

Joining the project artists — Heather Hesterman, Adam Lee, Louise Weaver, Dominic Redfern, Harry Nankin, Chris Bond, Peter Ellis, Mark Newbound, Live Particle and Sarah Tomasetti — are Yolngu artist Djirrirra Wunnumarra and emerging artist Uma Christensen.

This exhibition is funded by the Templeton Religion Trust.