‘Grass Stained Heart’

Nooka Shepherd

1st of February - 3rd of March

In the 13th century there was a practice, when asking a favour of a Saint, to make a pledge and bend a coin as a physical token of the pledge. The conversion of something commercial and worldly into something spiritual. In the late 1600s through the 1800s this evolved to a practice of taking coins and engraving them with initials, dates or images and then giving them to a loved one. These “love tokens” were offerings of devotion, reminders of heartfelt emotion, physical manifestations of loving human connection presiding over commodity.

Whilst I was in conversation with Nooka about her paintings and hand-crafted objects she commented, “they are like love tokens to world”. Yes, at their essence this is what they are – offerings between Nooka, the people who look at them, and the world we inhabit. More specifically, the ecstatic world that people have forgotten or are yet to experience. Nooka’s tokens are a call to a re-enchanting and re-souling of the world. Like a Siren’s song there is a spell being spun and a dance being drawn out giddily towards the stuff of fae and folkore, mystery and magic. Corporeal forms slide into otherly spaces, boundaries blurring in a place where harpies, hares, seraphs and humans cohabit.

For ‘Grass Stained Heart’ Nooka also presents new ceramic works, embroideries and a series of etchings depicting her own personal tarot major arcana. The ceramics take the form of puppets and human-vessel hybrids. They carry in them the joy of meditative making, of imbuing simple materials with life. These are creations that want to be touched, held, activated. Like humans crafted from clay and breathed into life these objects have been given something of the artist’s being.

The exhibition ‘Grass Stained Heart is Nooka’s creative act from the imaginal realm - a communication with the unseen. It is her joy and delight in the bizarre experience of being alive. Meister Eckhart states that, “When the soul wishes to experience something, she throws an image of the experience out before her, and enters into her own image." This is what Nooka has done with her love tokens and she wholeheartedly invites us to respond. Love tokens were not to be traded they were gifted. Imbued with love, delight and hope. She offers us this gift - a remembering, and honouring, the spirit of things, the essentials of experience. Secrets of the soul.

by Dr Chantal Powell