3 -18 October 2020

Sacred Gaia Healing’s™ internationally infamous healing products and services on show at ridiculous discounts. Artwork by LYNDEN STONE, (associate of Sacred Gaia Healing™) also on show.

LYNDEN STONE is a multi-disciplinary artist and arts educator. Her practice encompasses several conceptual themes including: “Visualizing the unvisualisable” (the pre-material world of quantum physics), the “Sacred Gaia Healing project” (a parody of gross exploitative capitalism in the New Age industry) and “The artist’s collections” (the real and imagined collections of the artist). LYNDEN holds a PhD in Fine Art from the Queensland College of Art where she has taught painting and drawing. She has also taught at Queensland University of Technology and South Bank TAFE. After re-locating to the Northern Rivers of NSW, she now teaches visual art and art history at TAFE NSW Murwillumbah.

Room Sheet and Essay by ALANA WILSON

LYNDEN STONE’s SACRED GAIA HEALING’S™ MEGA DISCOUNT PRICE SLASH is an exploration into reality and perception marked with frivolity. Her practice encompasses several conceptual themes including “Visualising the unvisualisable” (the pre-material world of quantum physics), the “Sacred Gaia Healing project” and “The artist’s collections” (the real and imagined collections of the artist).

Performing as Angelica Leight alongside Master Chakra Valuer Runceley Chaser, STONE approaches the audience with carnival-esque theatrics. It would be necessary to consider the broader context of her work to fully understand her methods, yet it is better not to do so. The performative aspect is deliberately disorienting. Is she joking? Is she serious? When? It is the state of questioning that is the point.

Stone is not mocking, nor endorsing — she highlights our impulses toward either naïve acceptance or cynicism, and our transitions between these states, subtle and unique to the individual. She challenges the viewer to avoid syllogistic assumptions about legitimacy. She is not seeking to debunk these belief systems; in fact, she herself is a ‘believer’. Yet she employs mechanisms of theatre and hyperbole, engaging extremes in both her delivery and our internal responses. It is an examination of our processes of acceptance and rejection, the synthesising of knowledge from the realities we collectively and individually experience.

Real and imagined products are on offer here at ridiculous discounts. Dolphin food designed to pour directly down the drain, tarot cards featuring a pantheon of pseudo idols and exploitative heroes such as The Trump and The Oligarch, and capitalistic complexes, Indentured Labour and The Crypto-Currency Trader. The kitschy products are trademarked and discounted, with shameless promotion tactics and questionable graphic design. It’s all part of the fun. 

In the paintings, popularised new-age iconography of dolphins, rainbows, Hindu deities and tie-dye is utilised and revisited. The flatness of the surfaces communicates a superficiality and vacuousness, decorated with a bright palette and adorned with humorous, tongue-in-cheek texts. The titles are one-dimensional descriptions of the subject matter: MaRKeting and Healing MEGASTAR GuRu, Best Price Guarantee, Chakra Removal.

Ironically, through hokey concepts such as “Visualising the unvisualisable”, she explores the fundamental scientific principles of quantum physics, a field that may seem outside the scope of functional comprehension. The traditional Newtonian view of reality (things are solid and as-they-appear) versus the quantum (things are unpredictable and infinitely complex) parallels our attempted distinctions between the fabricated and the esoteric. It’s a dance with the unknown.

— ALANA WILSON, 2020