CHRISSY STUART

Light Sculpture & Arts-Based Research
contact@chrissystuart.com




The Blossoming of The Grail 2022
Metamorphose 2020    
Obelisk 2020
Fulgur 2020
Scintillae 2020
Red Uconscious 2020
Chimeric Passage 2022
Silent Currents 2019
Halographic Codex 2022
Harmonious Chemestry 2021


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The desert is a place that has geographically and historically been connected to the origins of life—a place of emergence from which the world once arose. 

The archetypal and archaic elements of the landscape naturally catalyze a feeling of a return to source. In this way, the desert is a region of renewal and a space between two worlds: the visible and the invisible, the material and the spiritual, the human and the non-human.

Harmonious Chemistry is a melting sundial that tells the elemental story of life and death, encapsulating both the human experience and the biorhythms of nature, recognizing them as one interconnected body. 

Thirteen hand-sculpted cast glass gnomons (the part of a sundial that casts the shadow) were individually encased in water, frozen, and extended into an ice sculpture sundial left to melt in the dunes of the Mojave Desert in the summer of 2021. Each performance elementally traced the path of the sun through the measurement of water and shadow. Upon completion of the melting process, thirteen clear ghost-like glass bodies were revealed. 

This is a living inquiry into our relationship with nature, and considers the possibilities and roles of eco-psychology and imagination in relation to our cultural response to climate change.


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Obelisk 3
cast glass 2020

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The Blossoming of The Grail is a diffraction series of transmission holograms that explores the imaginal, psychological, and spiritual elements in the creative work of artist and scholar, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, and presents a new body of transdisciplinarity research in the form of an ekphrastic artistic interpretation of ten selected artworks from Olga’s Meditation Plates and Visions series.


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The tie between ash and returning to origin.

Ash is the final extract from life itself; the physical matter that can take no further decomposition or elemental breakdown. Thus, what inevitably follows the “ash operation,” which marks the end and signifies chaos and death, is the rise of the phoenix, or rather, a new bloom.

Jellyfish blooms are equal parts beauty and terror, and the Portuguese Man o’ War, costumed in inflated pastel sails of pinks, blues, and purples, are reminiscent of nautical vessels and have the capacity to sting well after death. This work is the re-storying of a personal encounter with a Portuguese Man o’ War bloom that left me poisoned and hospitalized, and in contemplation of my own mortality and the ceaseless death-rebirth constellations of my own life immediately following the death of my younger brother.
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Times, Spaces, Dimensions

        The subtle antennae of the Tree (our psycho-sensory apparatus) will indeed fold into a sphere compact of all times and spaces simultaneously. The sphere will diminish to a dot, a bindu, a title which will vanish utterly, and that which remains will be No Thing. But it is the work of each individual so to cultivate those antennae that they respond to the slightest vibration from those ‘other’ times, those ‘other’ spaces, those ‘other’ dimensions that are in very truth Herself.

Darkness within darkness: the gateway to all understanding. – Lao Tzu

Sol niger is the alchemical “black sun” and the first operation in alchemy known as the nigredo, or “the blackening.” It refers to the transformative potential of illumination that the black sun offers in the initiatory descent into darkness when facing our shadows, our suffering, and that which lies hidden within the realm of the unconscious. 

The color chemistry of the Sol Niger ember is inspired by a personal photograph taken at 8:30am on the Pacific Coast Highway adjacent to Leo Carrillo State Beach on November 9, 2018 during my evacuation from Point Dume the morning of the Woolsey Fire.


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Green Cavern emerged through a deep engagement with the imaginal realm—what Islamic scholar Henri Corbin calls na-koja-abad, the “land of no-where” where the spiritual and material converge. Created through the Jungian technique of active imagination, the work takes form from a vision of an electric green cavern with a labyrinthine interior, a symbolic expression of the creative unconscious.

Glowing with elemental light, this sculpture evokes subterranean spaces—earth-wombs, sea caves, hidden grottos—traditionally associated with mystery, transformation, and rebirth. The cavern becomes a vessel, both hermetic and maternal, where inner alchemy unfolds. In the darkness of this imagined underworld, light forcefully asserts itself, illuminating the psyche’s fecund depths.

As a living image, it has been instrumental in guiding my research process and creative practice since its essence is that of a deep and vast cavern, suggesting the profound fecundity of the infinite psyche—a luminous threshold into the unknown, the unseen, and the infinite. It reflects the psyche’s responsiveness to a genuine seeker, and the ongoing dialogue between the conscious and unconscious that births meaning, insight, and form.

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