about | lana-ryles

“Is not the whole universe a strange skull in which meteors, suns, comets and planets rush (throb) endlessly?”

Kazimir Malevich

'Man’s skull represents the same infinity for the movement of conceptions. It is equal to the universe, for in it is contained all that sees in it. Likewise the sun and whole starry sky of comets and the sun pass in it and shine and move as in nature…'

Lana Ryles is a contemporary Australian symbolic painter based in Sydney whose work explores the relationship between neuroscience, perception and the numinous.

Ryles is an artist and scholar whose practice bridges neuroscience, philosophy and visual art. Her work investigates how neurological processes shape perception and consciousness, exploring the ways inner experience may be translated into visual form.

Drawing on lived experience of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE), her paintings examine heightened perceptual states often described as numinous-like auras. Influenced by the writings of Rudolf Otto and his concept of the numinous, the mysterious and wholly other dimension of experience, Ryles develops a symbolic language of grids, spirals and geometric forms that register altered states of perception.

She describes this territory as the neuro-numinous. The term defines the intersection of neurological processes and numinous experience.

Her paintings function as templates for perception, translating neurological experience into structured symbolic form and exploring the point at which scientific understanding and numinous experience converge.

1. artist quote on infinity, taken from “God is not cast down”, Malevich, 1922; as quoted in “Futurism”, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 65