Artist in Residence Talk: Art, Non-dualism, and the Divine (MT23)

Rosanna will discuss how her art practice is led by her study of yoga, philosophy & Sanskrit alongside a broader focus on the importance of female authorship of cultural foundational stories. Her work brings together divergent ways in which the divine is represented from East to West and are meditations on non-dualism and how the stories we are told shape our future. She is currently using painting, meditation, physical yoga & sound to explore concepts such as Para, the point at which form again touches formlessness and the Sadhana’s psychosomatic efforts to assimilate one’s body to higher and higher levels of cosmic body pattern. She will pose questions about where this work can be positioned, authorship and the importance of listening.

Rosanna Dean is a multi-disciplinary artist living in London. She received her MA from the Royal College of Art (2019), studied old master painting in Florence at the Angel Academy (2014). She has spoken on spiritual practice in contemporary art at the Courtauld Institute of Art and following a year residency at the Florence Trust received EU funding to develop her work exploring and converging different ways of representing the divine. Her journey with yoga began 12 years ago discovering ashtanga following a sudden and traumatic experience with death. In 2020 she went to India to deepen her yoga practice, qualifying as an Ashtanga yoga teacher in Mysore and researching ritual practices including Tantra and Theyyam in Karnataka.