THE GREAT MYSTERY AND ART OF MYSTICISM WITH MARY GRISEY

The fiber artist and spiritualist explores the double meaning of "medium" in art-making ☁️

THE 16 CREATIVE ARCHETYPES, DECODED

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Mary Grisey is a painter, fiber artist, and psychic medium.

MARY’S DIVERGENT CREATIVE STRATEGIES: ACTION/INACTION

• Revel in the not-knowing! Approach with curiosity! Mary’s endeavors as an artist and psychic medium constantly ask her to sit back into the space of the Unknown. Don’t freak when you don’t have the answer. Perhaps not knowing what you’re doing is the only way to journey somewhere new.¹

• Embrace alternative inputs and inspirational segues. It’s so easy to get in our heads about the “right” objects to study and examine while we research and develop our work. Studying tapestries to inform your fiber art practice? Boring, rote, traditional, tired! Tuning into the auric field of an Egyptian mummy? WEIRD, fun, surprising, wayyyyy more interesting.

• Don’t shame the thinking mind. Yes, Mary’s practice is incredibly intuitive. But even she has working days dominated by overthinking and intellectualizing… and for Mary, that work isn’t necessarily bad. Sometimes it’s a valid jumping off point for more examination and practice.

What’s your metaphorical Adderall — something that slingshots you into an inspired creative tornado of action?

Mary Grisey, The Things That Were, The Things That Are, The Things That Ever Will Be, 2019

My Adderall is my obsession to comprehend what we cannot see — all things that are a mystery of the universe. Whether I am channeling art or giving a psychic mediumship reading, there is a bit of satisfaction that I attain a little more and more knowledge about the Great Mystery.

The Great Mystery is that place we go when our bodies die…that place that lies beyond the outer reach of the known universe. And every time I am in the studio, I come to this profound realization that the Great Mystery is in fact within me.

What idea or concept are you chewing on? Has it shown up in your work yet?

There are a flurry of concepts. Lately, there are these “butterfly people” showing up in my meditations. I’m not totally sure what they are but I am repeatedly drawing, painting and weaving these creatures. They feel angelic almost; like these interdimensional beings resonating on some other plane of existence. My mother who passed away four years ago appears to me on my nature walks as a monarch butterfly.

Mostly I just show up in the studio and allow my Spirit to guide me — honestly, I have no fucking clue what I am doing in the moment and then realize one year after I create the work that I have channeled some extra-dimensional version of myself that exists in another timeline.

How particular are you about your notebooks? Pens? What do you write in and with?

SO PARTICULAR (HELLO to my Venus and Mercury in Virgo!). For my automatic writing practice, I use Moleskin Cahier Kraft Journal (lined). Sometimes I will get crazy with the color — like a hot pink. For sketching, I love Fabriano EcoQua Notebooks. The pens I use are Uniball Signo Dx 0.38.

What was going through your mind when you first decided to share your work?

It was my hope that the viewers might have some sort of Spiritual experience as they entered my woven installations — a space of wonder and awe where they might discover an imaginary time and contemplate their humanity.

The work would first hit their senses: They would see these huge weavings tower over them, they would smell the natural fibers enter their nostrils, they would hear the sound on a repetitive loop in a hidden speaker within my ceramic vessels.

What’s your media diet, at present?

Currently obsessed with the Otherworld Podcast!

To be creative and to make things in 2024 is objectively difficult. You have to square off with distractions, global anarchy, and perpetual haunting of the existential question: “why bother?” What keeps you coming back to the ring?

I am obsessed with the process and magic of art-making. It’s a blessing to be entrenched in the mess of the studio and feel the excitement of Spirit vibrating through me — there are no drugs that come close to this feeling. It’s why I return over and over again, even if I have nothing to show at the end of the day — I still showed up to experiment and play.

Mostly I just show up in the studio and allow my Spirit to guide me — honestly, I have no fucking clue what I am doing in the moment and then realize one year after I create the work that I have channeled some extra-dimensional version of myself that exists in another timeline.

John Cage was inspired to develop his practice of composing via random chance and chaos after reading a book about the Chinese divining practice, The I-Ching. What influences or inspiration from outside of your field or profession have made the biggest impact on your work or process?

When I was going to graduate school in Toronto, I had an annual pass to the Royal Ontario Museum. My favorite thing to do there was to spend time in the Ancient Egyptian wing. For my Affect Theory class, I wrote a whole essay on the auric field of a particular mummy, Djedmaatesankh, an ordinary middle-class woman who died in her early 30s.

Even though the subject of the paper was a bit odd to choose to write for art school, I knew the paper served more as “soul research” rather than a typical academic conversation. The thing that I loved about this particular mummy was that we couldn’t see beyond the cartonnage — what was inside was cloaked in mystery, just beyond our gaze.

Like I mentioned before, my obsession with the Great Mystery is my adderall. There were many hours spent with the mummy Djedmaatesankh — becoming intimate with the energetic residue left behind, and pondering that I was the age she was when she supposedly died. This led me to create a series of seven linen weavings hung from the gallery titled “Shrouds”, inspired by burial coverings and the mysterious aura that emanates from them.

What do you do “wrong” that makes your work successful?

I could list so many here, ha ha ha… But the one “wrong” that sticks out to me is my weaving practice. A lot of weavers would cringe that I just “eyeball” a lot of my thread measurements and honestly just bypass math all together when I am warping and threading the loom. I know my weavings are created with structural integrity, it’s just that at this point, weaving for me is not about exactness — its about conveying a feeling.

I am obsessed with the process and magic of art-making. It’s a blessing to be entrenched in the mess of the studio and feel the excitement of Spirit vibrating through me — there are no drugs that come close to this feeling.

You’ve been working on something and it just isn’t coming through the way you’d like — do you kill your darlings and scrap the whole thing? Do you compost the idea? Do you file it away in your cabinet of misfit concepts to review later?

This is a really hard question to answer because I have done all the above (especially in a fit of rage)! However, generally I would say there are no accidents in the studio. Even if something I make is too much from my thinking-mind I will always consider it and give it a space to live. There is something to be said about an idea I will find from a journal from ten years ago that I will in fact revive. Time is not linear, and sometimes our ideas become premonitions for our future selves.

What’s a weird superstition you subscribe to?

I don’t know if this is a superstition, but I grid my home with various specific crystals that I would like each particular room to feel like. My husband is pretty sure I have a crystal problem.

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1. [Ed. note from Michelle: One of my favorite professors used to remind us to ask “what… is… that…?” of ourselves throughout our artistic discoveries. It was so silly, but I loved how that phrase kept me on my toes and asked me to stay out of know-it-all territory.]