Barbara Bickel, Ph.D., is an collaborative artist, writer, researcher, and educator. Her art and arts-based writing strives to embody and live matrixal, Earth-based feminist and Indigenous worldviews that celebrate and embrace the sacred. She is an Associate Professor of Art Education Emerita and former director of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Southern Illinois University, Core Faculty at Southwestern College, Santa Fe in the Visionary Practices and Regenerative Leadership Ph.D. program, and co-founding director of Studio M*: A Research Creation Lab Intersecting Arts, Culture and Healing. She lives by the Salish Sea in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada where she creates and teaches art as a sacred inquiry and interdisciplinary meaning making process.
Artist Statement
Ritual is at the core of my creative artworking practice. It serves as a centering mechanism that empowers me to enter spaces of desire, grief, and the unknown with radical trust. Engaging art-making as a relational process of art-care with humans and more-than-human(s) opens me to realms of co-inquiry, learning, unlearning and healing that are abundant, playful, unsettling and mysterious. I trust the wisdom and power of art to teach with com-passion. When I follow art, I learn what I am afraid of, what I have been avoiding, and what I have been longing for. I begin to hear myself and the world in previously hidden keys, and I can glimpse what was previously inarticulate.
When I collaborate with artists, and those who do not yet call themselves artist, I open to that which can be transformative and restorative. In witnessing and wit(h)nessing each other with care and compassion, the possibility to migrate beyond the individual ego-limited self toward that which is greater-than emerges. Collaborating with the Earth in my artworking practice has brought me into a living and loving relationship with my ancestors, both human and more-than-human(s). It has been a slow journey of awakening to those who have always been with/in me, and for which I am indebted to art and its compassion.
To learn more about Barbara visit her personal website and the Gestare Art Collective archival website.
Studio M* 