Karen Dolmanisth presents:
Past Present Future
Oracles Priestessses & Healers
In Communion With
Primordial Divine Mother Consciousness
The environment honors impermanence not as loss, but as a sacred rhythm: the breathing of the living Earth.
This exhibition is alive. It is a sculpture that breathes, changes, and grows through the duration of its time at Hera Gallery. Each day the installation shifts—threads are added or reconfigured, spatial lines thicken or dissolve, forms deepen and recombine. The work invites viewers to return, to witness its transformation, and to experience the subtle movements of energy, intention, and presence that guide its evolution.
Drawing from ancient lineages of Oracles, Priestesses, and healers, the installation becomes a temporary sanctuary within the gallery—a place where stillness, breath, and embodied perception are honored as creative forces. The environment holds the rhythms of nature: waxing, fullness, waning, and disappearance. Its final moment will occur on December 22, when the installation dissolves back into impermanence, mirroring the dark moon’s fertile emptiness and the infinite potential of beginning again.
This installation emerges from a lifelong practice of attentive looking, contemplative making, and communion with the living world. At once sculptural, architectural, ritualistic, and deeply personal, the work unfolds through a lineage of practices rooted in women’s spiritual traditions, ecofeminist thought, and the long history of the Sacred Feminine. Drawing from ancient Goddess cultures, from Gimbutas to contemporary feminist scholarship, from the soul-alchemical writings of Jung to Taoist and Zen understandings of flow, Dolmanisth creates an environment that is both sanctuary and threshold—an invitation into the subtler states of consciousness through which art becomes an act of attunement.
The threads, fibers, knots, and suspended forms trace pathways through space, echoing cosmic webs, mycelial networks, neural patterns, and the intricate inward geometries of meditation. Each gesture is made through breath; each form arises through presence. The installation is not fixed but continually evolving—responsive to light, time, the artist’s daily rituals, and the invisible currents moving through the architecture of Hera Gallery. It is a living sculpture in five dimensions: ground plane, vertical ascension, overhead canopy, cardinal directions, and the quiet inner axis of the heart.
Visitors are invited to move slowly, to sense rather than interpret, to allow the space to shift the rhythms of breath and perception. Like the Priestess entering temple space, or the Oracle attuning to subtle currents, the viewer becomes a participant in the unfolding. What is experienced is not static form but process—cycles of emergence, fullness, dissolution, and renewal.
On December 22, the installation will complete its cycle. In alignment with the dark of the lunar month and the turning of the season, the work will be deinstalled, returning to emptiness. This dissolution is not an ending, but a return to the vast field of potentiality—the fertile dark in which all new beginnings germinate. Because this moment coincides with the Winter Solstice—the birth of new light from the longest night—the closing Artist Talk and Performance Ritual will honor the ancient upward-rising spiral of renewal, rooted deeply in the Earth while ascending toward the open future. In this shared turning, the work welcomes the heart-centered luminosity and infinite potentiality of the seasons to come.
Because this closing coincides with the Winter Solstice, the Artist Talk and Performance Ritual that day honors the emergence of new light from deepest darkness—an ancient turning in which the vertical spiral of renewal rises upward toward the future while remaining rooted in Earth’s core. This gesture opens a heart-centered horizon of possibility for the seasons ahead.
