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Irah Solomon Stewart

Solomon Irah Stewart is Ninth Circle Press' official artist in residence 

Solomon is an artist living and working in the U.K.

In Solomon's own words

'I most recent work has been focusing on the subject of the imagination, but when I say imagination I mean something quite specific and somewhat alien to the modern post-enlightenment way of thinking. It is what the philosopher Henry Corbin called the Mundas imaginalis, imagination as a field of knowledge as ontologically real as the world of the intellect or the senses. It is also the imagination that William Blake spoke of when he said “Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.” For Blake the imagination is what gave humanity a complete vision of reality; it was the bridge between the world of the supersensual forms and the material world of the five senses. Blake is a continual form of inspiration as I think his message is increasingly relevant, as Kathleen Raine pointed out his works stood as a protest against the increasing quantification of the universe and the reduction of both humanity and the natural world to mechanical objects. A process that has in no way slowed down since the enlightenment. It also stands as a unique protest against the bifurcation of the natural world and human consciousness after the epistemological break of the enlightenment and presents a different way of relating to the world, one governed by poetry and metaphor where the apprehension of the world was through imagination. This is a goal I seek to continue through my own works, drawing on the what the alchemist called the Aurea Catena the golden chain of inspiration passed down through generations of mystics, poets, artist and philosophers'

Solomon's Art Website

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