Immaterial Realms Series

Manuela Holzer created the Immaterial Realms Series between October 2023 and August 2024, and it represents, through sculptural expression, an alternative understanding of psychosis. Instead of viewing psychosis as a meaningless psychopathology, the Immaterial Realms Series depicts psychosis as an other-worldly experience that Manuela associates with the spiritual realm. The title of the Immaterial Realms Series speaks to a juxtaposition between the intangible nature of an altered state of consciousness experienced during psychosis and the tangibility of the sculptures, which locks them in consensus reality.

The small hessian-string figures represent Manuela unravelling in consensus reality, while the cement sand-cast elements represent Manuela in another realm that she considers spiritual in nature. In this spiritual realm, the logic of consensus reality is stretched, warped, and unrecognisably transformed, which is conceptually reflected in the nonsensical depiction of the naked body parts within the cement sand casts. All the sand-cast images take the form of relief sculptures. The intention was to purposefully visually explore an in-between space that is not flat nor fully three-dimensional. Conceptually, this in-between state feeds into the idea of being caught between two fundamentally different states of being during the psychotic experience, one being a spiritual realm and the other consensus reality.