Visions of the
Sacred Feminine

Kayla has said that

My journey into the sacred feminine began in 1978 when mysterious female forms, veiled and feathered, began to appear in my watercolors.

After several years of following the promptings of these mysterious images she began work on a MA in Arts and Consciousness at John F. Kennedy University.

A slide show I saw at that time on women's spirituality, as revealed in sculpture, symbols and paintings, from 25,000 BC to the present, gave her a name and meaning. This river of femaleness mirrored back to me something lost so long ago in the world family: sacred mother, sacred earth, sacred female power, sacred death, sacred body, sacred nature, sacred woman. It became a meditation practice for me to let these female images - incarnations - come through my hands and onto my paper. Influences from many cultures and from dream time entwined with my personal understanding to create a multifaceted view of what women could be.

My journey became a pilgrimage to sacred Mother sites in India, Thailand, Bali, Malaysia, Nepal, Burma, Java and later, England and Ireland. For nine months in India during 1983-84 I wore the sari and visited temples and Shakti Pithas dedicated to the goddess, photographing art, sculpture and women for my Masters thesis on the Mother Goddess and the Womb of Creativity. Sacred stones, holy wells and tree shrines brought me close to her presence in the earth. Later I found churches dedicated to Irish women saints and the Blessed Virgin Mary revealed the sacred feminine, western style, in a strange new light. Tibetan Buddhism and Anutara-yoga-tantra honored my inner holy woman and gave me spiritual practices that brought her deep into my life. It has certainly been an interfaith journey of discovery and recognition.

The labyrinth at Grace Cathedral and a wealth of great writers such as Susan Haskins in her Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor, allowed me to come full circle and find the sacred feminine in my religion of birth, Christianity. In the 1990s, as I came to the Cathedral, images of the Blessed Virgin Mary have slowly inhabited my meditations and revealed her shining countenance to me. An astonishing result of the exhibition of my paintings at Grace Cathedral and the encouraging feedback I received was the birth of a new series of contemporary iconic images of Mary done in watercolor.

The collection of materials that I accumulated over those years of exploration - slides of art, sacred sites and the women themselves from various cultures, an image bank of slides of the art work done by contemporary Bay Area women working with the re-imaging of the sacred feminine and my own personal quest materials, both paintings and prose - gave me the basis to create and teach many classes around the Bay Area.

All during this period from 1980 to 2000 I have been participating in group art shows on this theme of the sacred feminine. It is my hope that this artwork can give its audience a taste of what it's like to engage with the sacred feminine in a 'deep' way.

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