Ritual as/is Healing: The Somatic Language of Liminal Bodies

In the aftermath of rupture, a rite of embodiment emerges. The mending wound is a threshold at which the act of repair negotiates itself. We are invited to witness the personal narratives of three artists: Negar Sahebalzamani, Double Consciousness I & II and Sar-e Sofreh (2025); Kelly Halseth, At the Altar of Resentment (2025); and Alexia Paz Escobar Sincretismo Desplazado (2025). Their creative processes become both sites of individual reckoning and gestures of collective healing. Each practice translates the immaterial into a somatic lexicon; a language of care articulated through the syntax of repair. Through bronze, clay, or colour, each artist materializes grief, gendered exhaustion, and displacement as a sensorial meditation through ritual. 

In Negar Sahebalzamani's work, disembodied fragments of the corporeal and the ethereal are re-membered across the canvas, seeking to bridge disparities. Sahebalzamani’s process is both linguistic and somatic, translating memory, place, and self into a visual form. Double Consciousness II depicts the artist reclining against her parent on a deep-orange couch, with the parent’s upright posture contrasting with the daughter’s soft sprawl; pillows nestle around them as a plume of smoke billows in the background. In Double Consciousness I, Sahebalzamani paints herself applying makeup to her lower lash line, in front of a mirror; her reflection, loosely framed by a headscarf, synchronizes her gestures even when the mirror reflects. Forms emerge and dissolve within layers of pigment, mirroring the instability of memory itself. Traces of layered paint evoke both tenderness and fragmentation. Similarly, Sar-e Sofreh captures a fleeting moment of a Mehmooni—family gathering—of the artist surrounded by her loved ones at a dinner table, as the edges of the tableau blurs into stitches of fabric that extend outwards to our periphery. Her brushstrokes are a syntax; bridges of pigment spanning the liminal distance between unspoken words, vestiges of belonging, and a return to the body. Drawn from personal experience, her works become sites of private reckoning and collective reconnection. 

notably Sar-e Sofreh represents a moment of connectivity amid the continuous disconnection caused by displacement and migration. Her work reclaims lost lineages that were fractured by displacement through the visual medium. Here, gestures become speech: acts of visual embodiment that mediate between the self and collective memory while holding residues of translation and longing. Through the ritual of visual embodiment, painting becomes a site of intermediary healing. It gathers the multifaceted aspects of Sahebalzamani’s identity while simultaneously addressing collective grief, distance, and displacement, reshaped into continuity. 

Alexia Paz Escobar’s Sincretismo Desplazado addresses a similar grief of displacement, but rather than bridging the fragments into cohesion, she dwells in the in-between—the fine line between the human and the non-human, the present and the non-present—as it manifests in mythology and storytelling. The sculptural work is both organic and synthetic, characterized by a combination of hand-pressed surfaces and liquid-smooth textures. The elongated white limbs extend with a tense corporeality, while the box-like torso is painted to resemble two bus systems: one side echoing Montreal’s STM, the other a Bolivian micro. A liminal, moon-like face looks to the side, refusing the viewer’s gaze. The combination of geometric form with uncanny anatomy renders a creature in transit—neither here nor there, acknowledging those who resonate with its liminality. In this way, the artist offers tender softness to her creation through process and thus projecting it outwardly. Yet the work resists a single temporality. It exists concurrently in the present, a distant past, or a speculative future. In this suspension, transformation becomes healing. Liminality becomes a sacred state of being, a ritual of becoming veiled in care. 

The dual texture collapses the distance between the natural and the synthetic, wherein the artist's touch is a mark of persistence, inhabiting the threshold between body and myth, sacred and profane, intentionally carving a vessel for unspoken grief. Outspoken about her immigration journey in Canada, she experienced violent rebuilding: living in two places and fully belonging to neither. Her process seeks to unearth where grief resides in the body and translate it into materiality. The uncanny surface serves as a visual surrogate for what is and what should be, evoking her spatial separation that structures diasporic life.  

Acts of grooming, dressing, and cleaning reveal an unspoken need for tenderness, in which gestures of self-maintenance can become expectations and a burden. Within this site of negotiation, Kelly Halseth’s At the Altar of Resentment situates care as a form of performance. The installation features oversized cast-bronze grooming tools, a discoloured bra worn by the artist, and a weathered sewing table repurposed as a vanity. Here, tools and objects become stand-ins for actions: the ritualized presentation of femininity, the domestic labour performed in private, and the inheritance of composure rehearsed time and again, until it dissolves into resentful endurance rather than a radical act. 

Halseth’s use of bronze grounds her exploration of the ecology of care. The medium’s density conveys the weight of obligation, the strain under emotional duress and physical labour. Bronze exists in a duality: heavy and malleable, yet it endures. It echoes the cyclical labour of care, which is materially taxing, corporeally demanding, and steeped in exhaustion. The labour the artist performs is paradoxically absent yet omnipresent—unseen in its execution, yet essential to the polished effortlessness that the work critiques. Traces of patina and its friction haunt the object. Halseth’s ritual is one of confrontation: allowing oneself to occupy space and demand time to heal the exhausted body and mind. Healing manifests in tangible ways through daily sacrifices and unspoken gestures, embedded in the work itself: the repetitive motion of brushing, tweezing, cinching, and fastening that these oversized bronze tools exaggerate, and the physical strain and discomfort of a misshapen bra worn by the artist. 

Together, the practices of these artists form a continuum of care through grief. Each artist negotiates the aftermath of a rupture through a common language of material gestures: whether a reclamation of fragments of memory, a transformation of displacement into myth, or a reckoning with gendered endurance. By closely attending to material and somatic experiences arising from paint, clay, or bronze, they create a tangible connection to the immaterial, allowing it to take form through rituals and processes. As artistic expression becomes a site of language and translation, we must confront the gravity of each work's sensory impact. Each choice becomes a conduit between the internal and the external, rendering emotions and grief legible through surface matter. Their rituals imagine a collective body that holds fractures with tenderness and teaches us how to mend.