4 - 26 May, 2021

Opening: Sunday 2 May, 4 - 6 pm

Artist Talk: Saturday 9 May, 12 - 1 pm

Artist Workshop: Sunday 22 May, 11am - 1 pm

Karen Sewell is a visual artist who lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, New Zealand.  Sewell graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (with Honours) in 2016 from Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design. She works across multiple media including sculpture, installation, painting, drawing and photography, specialising in installation practice.

Sewell is interested in the intersection of art with spiritual experience. She aspires to create artworks that activate spaces for participants to be able to experience liminal moments of awareness of the unknown, an awakening to wonder, or numinous experiences.  Sewell notes that, “Numinous” speaks to everything within the realm of our experience which cannot be quantified, explained, or contained: our intuition, and our feeling-states, our connection to the cosmos, and for some a sense of divine.” Sewell was the recipient of the Premier Award in the Waitakere Trust Art Award in 2011, and has been selected as a finalist in The NZ Portrait Awards in 2012 and the Glaister Ennor Graduate Awards in 2016. 

Numinous Spheres aims to explore relationships between abstraction, spirituality, colour, light and space, contributing to the conversations around the connections between abstraction and spiritual experience, and locating these in the local context of Northcote and its numerous and diverse cultures and faith-based communities.