Morgan Bayona
Simsbury, CT
Printmaking
Art History (minor)
Morgan is 22 years old from Simsbury, CT. She attended Simsbury High School. Morgan is a printmaking major and Art History minor. Her focus is in printmaking and painting, though she also participates in many forms of craft art such as jewelry making, knitting, and some textile work. Reoccurring themes in her work include pattern, spirituality, and the occult. She is inspired by her heritage, as well as repetition and patterns found in nature and the human body.
In my work, I explore the concept of the mystic value and its relationship with function through printmaking. I started this journey with a preliminary exploration of incorporating automatic writing into my work. This writing is said to be produced by a spiritual, occult, or subconscious agency rather than by the conscious intention of the writer. The basic ideas of repetition began to take form: using patterned line and texture as a gateway into the unconscious mind and creating variety by using a linear matrix in different colors to change how the work is perceived. They are created with the purpose of acting as sigils; to explore the ideas of intention and reactions. Sigils are inscribed or painted symbols that are considered to have magical power once they are charged with energy from the creator. In this body of work, I include a combination of lithographs and monoprints using lithography, monotype, and painting. They are typically created for the creator’s singular use or given to someone for their singular use. However, I diverged from this expectation to create multiples of many of them and made all of them to be ready to be filled with the intentions of their owners once they leave my possession.
The idea of reactions is important to this process, not only in their creation but also in what gives them power. The process of creating a sigil is what gives it power and I wondered if creating multiples or creating them without my own intention would take away from this power. Sigils use the law of attraction to work, by putting out the intention for the universe to react to. I created my own series of reactions to help my work create its own power. The first step in this process is to use automatic writing to create them without my own intentions staining them. From there, I react to these images and add color either as a layer or as part of the matrix itself. Before I present these, I charge them so that they become more than just images. Ways to charge a sigil can include pushing energy into the sigil by using energy work, meditating intently on the sigil, or dancing around the sigil. This charging is another reaction of sorts, as I then become a viewer of my own work. When the viewer sees the image, they naturally react to it. Whether in their head or out loud, they will form thoughts based on what they are seeing. To add another layer of reactions, I include eyes in all my work, so that the art is looking and “reacting” back at the viewer.
While many may not believe in magick, that isn’t the point of these prints. These are meant to be a reflection on how they have created: the process in which it takes to make a sigil and to make a print run parallel. This is a painstaking process done with love by its creator to be a means to an end: to put their intentions out in the world and see if they can make the viewer or the universe respond.