Ornamental Hallucination

Cybele Cox

Opening 04.10.18 6-8pm
Artist Talks 27.10.18 6-7pm

Ornamental Hallucination is a glimpse into the cave where the Sibyl Sphinx presides. This is an enchanted kingdom, with sphinxes, hybrid animal/human forms, revelling in the connection to the divine, the psychic function of our ancestral selves.
Sybil Sphinx is a hybrid creature, a blend of all attributes, lost to this modern era. She sits like an animal because she is connected to her instincts. And while her limbs and torso are male in physique, she wears a medieval styled armour of feminine glory; five boobs hang from chainmail, two female faces; one on each shoulder as a protective padding. The crowned satyr head, symbolic creature of the woods, the human/animal archetype; is an inspired reveller. She squats like a frog, reminding us that our animal resides in the bodies posture.

In building this monument I’m attempting to evoke an ancient mystical icon that resonates with the collective mythic imagination, with the same potency as Virgin Mother Mary has been in the last thousand years of western religious worship. She is however a more empowered deity. Active, connected to nature, to sex and to the psychic mystical realm.

Unsure, as many people of today are, of what to believe in, I am incarnating a venerable feminine prophet. The Sibyl is a guide and a seer. When she speaks to the seeker, she speaks to their soul. People sought long journeys by foot in the ancient world, to the hidden caves of her subterranean kingdom, in search of her council, or to dedicate their book of spells to her or to dwell enamoured in her enchanted grotto.

Ornamental Hallucination is setting the stage for a new religion to be built upon, new values, to recapture the collective imagination into an invisible realm infusing hope and love with communal sharing and reverence of hybrid bodies, of the sexual omnipotence within nature, fluidity of identity and acceptance of the ambiguity within the self.