Canopy Breach, by Dorothea Van Camp
The Ambiental is a latest online exhibit for the Pell Lucy artist collective, now on view on Arsty.net. The exhibit will run through January 2027 and can be seen here.
From the curatorial statement:
“Ambiental is a Spanish and Portuguese term that describes what surrounds us. This mellifluous adjective-turned-noun has become my preferred name for where creativity—and its deep appreciation—can thrive and flourish…
The Ambiental is both a metaphor for the wild and unwieldy nature of the artistic process and a territory for safekeeping our inchoate visions, intentions and passions. Its vitality is even more crucial during times of external collapse and dissolution because it carries the throughline of generative creativity into the next (and, hopefully, better) era.”
(The full statement is included below.)
The act of art making is essentially a solo venture, frequently carried out in the solitude of a studio space. What these difficult times have helped many of us see is how essential it is to blend the requirement for private time with a concomitant focus on building community. We need a both/and defense system that can provide personal and professional support in the face of many of our sustaining cultural and creative systems being eroded.
The Ambiental is a large tent that can house the many flavors of a creative life. It supports making as well as looking, private encounters along with public ones, the personal and the political, the need to be alone as well as the need to be with others. So step right up, admission is free.
Pell Lucy is also very happy to welcome new artists (and a returning member) into the collective. These are remarkable artists whose works speak to our credo: form has an intelligence of its own that is beyond the capacity of language. We are thrilled to have each one of them with us.
Images from The Ambiental exhibit along with a link to each artist’s website follows.
THE AMBIENTAL
Curatorial Statement
Ambiental is a Spanish and Portuguese term that describes what surrounds us. This mellifluous adjective-turned-noun has become my preferred name for where creativity—and its deep appreciation—can thrive and flourish.
The Ambiental is an updated name for an ancient idea. The Greeks believed that a personal divine spirit, a daemon, guided each artist’s creative output. John Keats chose the term “negative capability” to describe an artist’s capacity to remain in uncertainty without grasping for conclusions. In a more contemporary context, musician Van Morrison wrote about going “into the mystic.”
Rather than an escape from difficult times, The Ambiental is where deeper, more complex frequencies can be tapped, where signals are filtered from noise and nudges are followed with abandon. Fugitive and rarefied energies flourish here–the spiritual, the ecological, the mystical, and the deep grammar of form itself. It holds it all, from the making of art to the exquisite pleasure of connecting deeply with the work of others.
The Ambiental is both a metaphor for the wild and unwieldy nature of the artistic process and a territory for safekeeping our inchoate visions, intentions and passions. Its vitality is even more crucial during times of external collapse and dissolution because it carries the throughline of generative creativity into the next (and, hopefully, better) era.
Pell Lucy artists have an intimate understanding of The Ambiental. Their shared belief that form has its own intelligence gives them an intimate understanding of creativity’s limitlessness. Many have been artists for a lifetime, and their very particular journey can be traced by looking carefully at the works included in this exhibit.
So step into this domain with us. Extraordinary things can happen here, and all are welcome in The Ambiental. All.