We are excited to launch the 2025 Season of Sacred Grounds Coffeehouse Artist in Residence. The Artists will be at our place for a week doing live art, talking to the curious, and showing off their talent. Every Friday at 6 pm, we will have an artist reception for the artist of the week. Come support them and their work.
This week’s artist is Doot Bokelman.
As a lifelong artist and art history professor, I have always been interested in the human form as an instrument for conveying complex ideas. Traditionally, the female nude was the object of a male gaze, made by males for a male audience. Using mixed media, in my work I reclaim that form and purposefully de-sexualize my female nudes while making them elf-like to create a new mode of visual communication. In 2016, 2019, and 2020, I traveled to a pueblo in New Mexico to study with Native American sculptor Roxanne Swentzell, who makes figurative sculptures in a traditional coil technique. Combining her technique with my abilities as an empath, medium, and psychic, I seek to express my interest in the esoteric world of superstition, mysticism, and magic as well as in various indigenous mythologies from around the world that are integral for teaching Art History. I create toddler-sized elementals: supernatural beings who engage with magic, superstitions, and other supernatural beings. My multi-racial, usually nude, non-sexualized female-humanoid beings engage with natural substances, like clay, rocks, and sticks, or other elemental spirits like banshees, spirit animals, and gargoyles. These “dirt babies” respond to these various substances or beings with gestures and reactions that are quite human. Because these small human-sized creatures are somewhat familiar to us, they are meant to elicit a tender emotional response, but their unnatural appearances are also meant to be disquieting. I believe an artist should provide her audience with a unique experience by allowing them a glimpse into an enchanted world that is filled with magical beings pursuing their interests.
This event runs from 7/28-8/2!