Page 4 - Sacred Nude

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Jessica K. Ballantyne (b. 1986, Pretoria, South Africa)
From early on, Jessica K. Ballantyne has been drawn to the female body
as a subject, metaphor and vehicle for personal experience. Graduating
from the University of Pretoria in 2008, her final BA Fine Arts degree
project The Bold and the Sexual (taken from the title of the popular
American soap-opera, The Bold and the Beautiful, which she watched
daily as a teenager) focused on the female form and a critique of pop-
ular media representations of the objectified body of the female sexual
experience. The paintings from this period were also a celebration of
subjective feeling expressed through the female form. The influence of
the Surrealist movement pervades the paintings and inspired later work
involving the gaze.
Jessica Ballantyne’s artwork has evolved since she moved to the United
Kingdom in 2009; alongside her studies of consciousness and medita-
tion. With the Sacred Nude series, the purpose is to invite the viewer to
experience peace and serenity.
Therefore, Sacred Nude is an inspired discourse where the artist displays
morphed female bodies, which are at once both singular and multiple,
and in which the Flower of Life, an ancient and sacred geometric sym-
bol, communicates meaning. For Ballantyne, the Flower of Life repre-
sents a transcendental emblem of an ethereal self, an energy existing
outside the physical body. Ballantyne feels that creating and visually
displaying Sacred Geometry may serve as a conscious and subconscious
reminder of creative and healing energy.
In the Sacred Nude series the Flower of Life symbol remains a source
of light on the nudes, representing a physical and metaphorical light of
beingness. The artist’s fascination with the Flower of Life stems from her
research, not only with the metaphysical qualities of Sacred Geometry,
but also through her experience in meditation and neuroscience. For the
artist, the Flower of Life thus becomes a symbol offering the possibility
of healing and divine wisdom through self-reflection and meditation.
The Sacred Nudes are naked figures, inspired by classical nudes within
the Western cannon of female beauty, and as such are lavishly framed in
drapery. Using bodies that are familiar to her, Ballantyne investigates her
own ego and attachment to the physical body through these pieces.
These nudes are presented to us simultaneously as light and dark, they
do not seek to ignore the darker aspects of the soul: the ego-mind and
its associated fears of inhabiting a temporary, material body. The Sacred
Nude drawings attempt to confront the idealised narrative of Western
stereotypical beauty by distorting and disfiguring the bodies. Although
revealing a kind of spiritual or mental ‘darkness’ through distortion and
pose, the artist redeems the purity of the nudes by encapsulating them
in a ‘safe’, soft and sacred space where the light of wisdom or truth in the
form of the Flower of Life envelopes them:
As humans we are bombarded with imagery of women.
Unfortunately many of these images teach us to constantly
view ourselves from the outside, as bodies and objects without
subjectivity and presence. I rebel against this limiting portrayal
and invite the viewer into a private, psychological space where
I manipulate the physical body to speak about presence, tran-
scending the ego and letting go of attachments to the body and
mind. - Jessica K. Ballantyne
Maimuna Adam, curator and artist.