Elena Makansi | Forager

artist | writer | witch

Tucson, AZ

 

art is magic

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art is magic 〰️

 

Inspired by magic, biology, ecology, and the cosmos, I create works of art in a variety of media from digital illustration to mixed media drawing to watercolors. My creations come from a space of reverence and fascination for nature - honoring both the science and the magic of the weird and wonderful universes (yes, plural) we inhabit. Just as much as I feel our connection to nature is our birthright, something fundamental within our animal bodies that can never be taken away, I also often feel disconnection and estrangement here too, a tense fraying and knotting of this central cord that ties me to the world beyond my skin. I explore these feelings of alienation, grief, memory, and disconnection in my work “the endless forest" (the end of the forest)” as well as in the work of “strange bones” and “chimera,” hybrid creatures inspired by the biological forms of animals, plants, and fungi.

“All of nature in its awful vastness and incomprehensible complexity is in the end interrelated - worlds within worlds within worlds: the seen and the unseen - the physical and the immaterial are all connected - each exerting influence on the next - bound, as it were, by chains of analogy - magnetic chains. Every decision, every action mirrors, ripples, reflects and echoes throughout the whole of creation. The world is indeed bound with secret knots.”

Valentine Worth