Niradhara Lynne Marie is an outsider artist with a visceral visual voice. She brings insight to empowering the humble stitch through creating powerful images of women. these works are a visionary’s imagery of the human body as holy book, a sacred text - the temporal covering of the body is represented as a quilt, a covering of grace rendered in textile inks, encaustics, wax resists and dyes, organic prints, ink-jet prints, tattooed with needle and threads on salvaged linen fragments in hand & free-motion stitchery. This Fine art in the vernacular form of quilt, is transcendent Stitchery for mending the fragmented human condition. As the ancient practice of story-telling in stitchery is a part of the lexicon of folk language, of women all over the globe as well as men in many cases. tribal communities employ the humble stitch as a visual voice, such as in India, the practice of piecework is called Katha – a combining of fragments of cloth to tell a story, document a life passage. This artist’s work continues her relationship to this story, herstory.
She has worked and lived on Nantucket Island and the Williamsburg Waterfront in Brooklyn. Recent solo exhibitions include CAVE Gallery, (*) Artspace and CVB Gallery. She is an invitational artist at Kashya Hildebrand Gallery in Chelsea, NYC for the month of June 2006 in a group exhibit to raise consciousness of violence against women and raise funds and awareness for V-Day. An advocate of art in women's prisons, her work in prison ministry grew over 5 years, producing and facilitating art programs to revive the creative spirit was at MCI Framingham.
Rev. Niradhara is also an ordained Interfaith Minister, Pyro-priestess, Vegan, certified international Yoga instructor, an expatriate and a migrant grandmother. she lived in rural India for an extended tapasya, to practice and study in the service of the sacred fire. She is currently in rural ireland doing ashram seva as a yoga and vedanta teacher at the haidakhan bhole baba spiritual centre.
Her work continued a creative process invoking atonement [covering and mending] as the transcendant language of a woman's work through the power of her hand's. the work itself is prayer... as spoken word manifests its truth through mantra /affirmation so it is with any sound / visual witness / movement / task drawn out of the body.
The latest series of work is called 'sutras', in Sanskrit, this literally means 'thread'. The process of creating this work is a gateway between gravity and grace, Tattooing cloth with thread, marking rites of passage both ceremonial and mundane, as words mark a sacred book, so this thread marks the cloth representing the body.
In her series Temporal Coverings she creates shelter for the human soul, conceptually formed as a quilt using the artist's assemblages of vintage linens which she overdyes, paints, marks and variously hand prints with inks, beeswax, dyes and encaustics and details the work covering it in an elaborate tattooing of stitchery. The new work is about being uncovered, unsheltered, unprotected, unloved. The act of making this work creates a prayer for re-covering and the working title for these pieces is "sutras". Each piece deals with differing social issues of disenfranchised people, and the artist's increasing identification as one of these persons. The work is about creating soul shelters, like a quilt or a tallis or a prayercloset.
Niradhara is a practicing Agnihotrin and Homa Therapist, and is an Interfaith Minister ordained in June of 2008 by the Interfaith Temple of NY at St Johns Cathedral chapel.
