Writings
This page gathers the published and developing papers that form the academic arc of my research into art, spirituality and secular experience. The writing begins with the claim that spiritual or awakening experiences can arise outside religious institutions, especially through nature and the arts. It then moves to the case of Marina Abramović as a contemporary artist whose performances, methods and public role demonstrate how art can function as a spiritual-but-non-religious environment. The most recent work refines the argument by proposing that art is not spirituality itself, but a spiritual technology: a set of embodied, affective and participatory practices through which spiritual states may be generated, sustained and shared.
The synopses on this page are intended to help readers follow the development of the argument across published articles, unpublished papers and future essays.
Journal Papers
My writing develops a non-religious and interdisciplinary account of art as a site of spiritual experience. Across articles and papers, I examine how spirituality can be studied through lived experience, affect, embodiment, ritual, attention and transformation, rather than only through doctrine, belief or institutional religion.
The three foundational papers below trace the evolution of this enquiry. The first expands the ontology of spirituality to include non-religious experiences arising through art and nature. The second examines Marina Abramović as a paradigmatic case of a contemporary artist whose work operates as a spiritual-but-not-religious context. The third refines the argument further by proposing that the arts function not simply as expressions of spirituality, but as technologies capable of producing, regulating and sustaining spiritual states.
Taken together, these texts establish the intellectual basis for my wider research into art as spiritual technology: the idea that aesthetic and artistic practices can alter perception, organise affect, generate symbolic intensity, create forms of collective ritual, and open experiences of meaning, connection and self-transcendence in secular contemporary life.
Paper synopses
1. Awakening Experiences in Non-Religious Contexts: Expanding the Ontology of Spirituality to Art and Nature
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2021, Vol. 53, No. 1
This article argues that spiritual or awakening experiences can occur outside religious contexts, especially through encounters with art and nature.
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Synopsis: This article begins from the methodological difficulty of defining spirituality and shifts attention from abstract belief to lived phenomenological experience. Using a heuristic, comparative textual method, it places William James’s accounts of religious and mystical experience in dialogue with Bjarne Sode Funch’s account of aesthetic experience and Peter Ashley’s work on wilderness or nature-based spirituality. The article argues that certain intense encounters with visual art and nature are phenomenologically analogous to religious or mystical experiences: they may involve altered consciousness, self-transcendence, unity, intensified perception, awe, wonder, peace, ineffability, non-transferability and noetic or transformational capacity. Steve Taylor’s work on spontaneous awakening experiences provides a broader classificatory framework, allowing aesthetic and nature-based experiences to be understood within an expanded ontology of spirituality. The article therefore proposes that art can trigger spiritual or awakening experiences without requiring religious doctrine or context.
Place in the framework: This paper establishes the first move in the framework: spirituality can be studied beyond religion by comparing the phenomenology of experiences across religious, artistic and natural contexts.
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2. Art as Spirituality: The Paradigmatic Case of Marina Abramović
ournal for the Study of Spirituality, 2023, Vol. 13, No. 1, 5-19. DOI: 10.1080/20440243.2023.2187966
This article uses Marina Abramović as an empirical case study of how contemporary art can operate as a spiritual-but-not-religious environment.
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Synopsis: This article examines Marina Abramović as a paradigmatic contemporary artist whose practice demonstrates how art can function as a spiritual-but-not-religious context for both artists and audiences. Working within the secular environment of the contemporary artworld, Abramović draws on spiritual practices, altered states of consciousness, endurance, pain, presence and long-duration performance without grounding her work in institutional religion or theology. The article reconstructs her spiritual and artistic formation through autobiography, interviews and public material, and considers her through Denita Benyshek’s operationalised concept of the artist-shaman. It also draws on Victor Turner’s concept of communitas and contemporary accounts of pain, empathy and brain-to-brain resonance to analyse performances such as The Artist Is Present and 512 Hours. The article concludes that Abramović can be understood as a nonreligious spiritual charismatic figure whose performances, method and institute generate healing, liminal participation and countercultural communitas.
Place in the framework: This paper provides the central case study: the contemporary artist as a secular spiritual figure who can create ritual, presence, transformation and collective experience without religious doctrine.
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3. Art as a Spiritual Technology: An Evolutionary, Anthropological and Neuroscientific Perspective
Final draft, 2026
This paper refines the argument by proposing that the arts are not spirituality itself, but a spiritual technology: a repeatable embodied means of producing spiritual states.
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Synopsis: This paper moves from the claim that art can be spiritual to the more precise proposition that the arts function as a spiritual technology. Drawing on Ellen Dissanayake’s theory of artification, functionalist anthropology, material religion, affect theory, attachment-based neurobiology and recent neuroscience on entrainment and synchrony, it argues that the arts are not merely symbolic accompaniments to religion. They are among the primary biocultural means through which spiritual states are generated, shared and sustained. Rhythmic, multimodal and participatory arts — including music, dance, chanting, gesture, visual marking and ritualised performance — regulate affect, entrain attention, produce collective intensity and support embodied meaning-making. The paper also reverses a common hierarchy between belief and ritual: in many contexts, belief is not the cause of artistic-ritual participation, but one of its effects, consolidated after bodies have already been drawn into synchrony, emotion and shared experience.
Place in the framework: This paper gives the mature formulation of the framework: art is not identical with spirituality, but can act as a technology for spiritual experience, affective regulation, collective coherence and self-transcendence.
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Essays
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This essay discusses how Burtynskyʼs Globalization discourse is developed through the analysis of his latest project, Water, based on the app Burtynsky : Water 2007-2013, Melcher Media, 2013.
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This essay attempts to apply Peter Osborne’s advanced theories of photography, as formulated in the essay Infinite Exchange: The Social Ontology of the Photographic Image (Osborne, 2010) to Andreas Gursky’s image Untitled XV (2008). Specifically, it will address the issues of presumed medium anxieties instigated by the photograph’s unique indexical, temporal, and material qualities.
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The aim of this essay is to analyse a rather unique example of a literalization and visualisation of Baudrillard’s philosophical ideas about simulation in a mass culture product, the movies The Matrix Trilogy. Baudrillard’s approach of three orders of simulation is in turn applied to ‘unpack’ The Matrix Trilogy.
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This essay discusses how Burtynskyʼs Globalization discourse is developed through the analysis of his latest project, Water, based on the app Burtynsky : Water 2007-2013, Melcher Media, 2013.
I analyze which devices the artist uses to formulate the globalized nature of the message of this work. I argue that globalization is a concern expressed by his choice of themes, the geographical extension of his work, the single images, the incorporation of the new global technology embedded in the apps and the choice of new distribution channels via the World Wide Web. All these aspects feed on each other to help generate a pervasive global ʻreachʼ and positioning of his work.
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The aim of this essay is to analyse how Ana Mendieta has used her own body as a vehicle to explore and express her political message.
Dissertation
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