Swedish multifaceted artist, Nadine Byrne, conjures ritualistic images in varied gammas of disciplines. Together, with the Dream Family and her music projects, she binds her personal aesthetic with action.

Rituals are everywhere. We sometimes forget that rituals are the decantation of abstract ideas into the symbolic actions that give them a body. They are also performances –a stratified group of procedures meant to communicate said abstract ideas to the earthly realm. That’s why when Nadine and her group, the Dream Family, perform a ritual they’re not only acting up a role, but creating the transcendence between the ethereal and corporeal.

The Dream Family sprung to the spotlight in 2009. They are a group of people that have developed their own rites and were familiar with Nadine through another one of her projects, The Magic State. “The work with Dream Family is an investigation of the ritual as choreography,” she remarks, “filled with personal meaning, as well as the aid of costumes in creating a sacred moment. It is the building of a belief, the mystification of something essentially mundane. It is a group of people feeling and filling a need of connecting with something outside the boundaries of what everyday-life have to offer in a society where consumerism has been elevated into religion.”



Now, when we talk about Nadine’s rituals, we don’t associate them with any religion in particular. But even if she doesn’t profess any particular creed, that doesn’t make her approach any more secular: “I don’t belong to any religion, but I have my own believes. They are kind of a mixture I guess. I did not have a religious upbringing but my parents are open-minded and somewhat spiritual people. I have always been encouraged to form my own belief. But sometimes I have a hard time separating faith from fascination, although I would not be so into these subjects if I did not feel them too.”

And a religious reverence comes from her work. Like the differences between Mel Gibson and Andrei Tarkovsky, captivating the sacred into artworks is less about the vane repetition of religious imagery and more about a pursuit of the ephemeral through an aesthetic search. “That is exactly what I feel like!” she comments upon a similar note. “It is that feeling of sacredness, holiness. Something you cannot see nor touch but that fills people up completely. Faith, transcendence -- an otherworldliness I guess. I am completely inspired and amazed by it. For me it is proof that this world consists of so much more than we can imagine and that makes it more livable.”

Working with rites is a work with language itself. If poetry is opening the denotative meaning of language to new horizons, there is certainly poetry in Nadine’s translation of the religious symbols to her own, private microcosm. “Pretty much from the start, when I started using symbols in my work, I felt a need to create my own as well. A lot of my artistic practice so far has been about taking existing phenomena's (often of somewhat religious matter) and transform it into my own - give it a meaning that relates to me.  So yes, it was a conscious decision but the content of this symbolic language has grown with time and the production of new artworks, associations, memories, knowledge.”



And even though she flirts with such a variety of disciplines as illustration and music, maybe her most astonishing works are those that decant into wearable sculptures, where the human body ends up being the host of the artistic transformations. “I think the human body is the perfect blank canvas, because it is not blank at all, if that makes any sense. The notion of the body is something you can play with and pretty easy get fantastic results. Also I am fascinated by the body as a tool for expanding your mind. When it comes to my sculptures though, it is more the concept of the wearable art-work, and the purpose of what is being worn that interests me.”



Music, to this kind of approach, comes natural, as the vibrations that produce sound in the air already binds something strictly physical with a disembodied manifestation. As today, she’s invested in two different audiovisual projects: Ectoplasm Girls and The Magic State. “Well Ectoplasm Girls was the first project I did, together with my sister Tanya Byrne, The reason for the emergence of The Magic State was partly me wanting to do something on my own but also The Magic State focuses on subjects that needed a project of their own. The projects are a bit similar in sound and subject you may think, but I think of them very differently. Ectoplasm Girls is something between me and my sister, like a wasteland full of common memories and sadness, and hope and fascination. The Magic State is just mine and lets me fully engage in my obsession with transcendence, ritual etc. I think of them visually very different as well.”

Nowadays she’s working on a short 16mm film about the Dream Family and preparing to graduate next spring. After that, we should expect the depth of her work to widen. Who knows? Maybe this is how a new occultist trend begins.

Text by Oscar Gomez Poviña @ VNFOLD