The 2024 MA festival title ‘I paint what I want to hear’ paraphrases ‘I paint what I want to see,’ a title of a book by the celebrated 20th century artist Philip Guston. The book offers Guston’s reflections on abstraction and figuration, symbol and artmaking. For Guston, the canvas had always been an arena for what he called ‘frustration.’ Frustration, he writes, is important, almost crucial. Without it, we would ‘vanish into either meaning or clarity, and who wants to vanish into clarity or meaning?’

This search without answers, the exploration of the spirited beyond, is what in many ways drives the work of Annabelle Guetatra, this year’s festival’s artist of choice. Annabelle works across media, creating gentle drawings, films, and animations, all imbued with unapologetic candour, quiet magic, and infectious passion and commitment. In our correspondence, Annabelle explains that her latest work explores the depths of the soul and the quest for oneself – an obsession that she occasionally gets herself trapped in, working tirelessly carried away by the ecstatic process. The artist losing herself in the works exploring the search for self – what a metaphoric hall of mirrors to find (or rather, to lose) oneself in.

The pages of the festival catalogue are adorned with Annabelle’s sounding souls, searching souls. The miniature nude figures, most of them female, as well as curious hybrid creatures with fish tails and extravagant headdresses, float across the image plane, creating sonorous compositions, where each movement is carefully tender and thought through – as in a dance composition or a ritual. Annabelle is fascinated by sacred rituals across different cultures and the choreographies that emerge from them. Her grandmother was a dancer and, hence, a relationship with the body has always been important for her. The artist creates her characters on semi-transparent pattern paper used in sewing and dressmaking – she then cuts them out and glues onto the image. This technique allows great freedom in assembling and moving the characters on the sheet. ‘I’m waiting to find the moment when it will sound just right, like a melody,’ she explains.

When Annabelle was growing up, her mother had a prayer altar in the living room, at which Annabelle and her sister would make wishes and leave offerings. ‘I found this installation fabulous and magical. It closed and opened like a book, but with another dimension,’ she comments. Across countless cultures and times, this quest for another dimension has been facilitated by offerings and ingestion of sacred plants, such as henbane, anemone, delphinium, poppies, lotuses, and myriad others… Many of maenads in Annabelle’s drawings, too, carry herbs and flowers, where each plant brings their own magical powers and virtues, their own way of taking us on a journey, a dream, an inner quest. Plants express a unique capacity to collapse a distance between the world and their own being, as they translate the light, the intensive core of reality, into their extensive and superfluous physical presence. In this, plants teach us that the journey inwards, or the inner healing, and the journey outwards, or the discovery of the other, are inextricably connected.

The search for self transforms seamlessly into the search beyond the self: an inner sublime takes us out of the confines of the little ego towards the immense and indecipherable unknown. Thus, the word ecstasy, from Greek ekstasis, means exactly that – ‘to stand outside of or transcend oneself,’ as in mystical practice, through a visionary experience and union with the divine. Ecstasy is not a decoupling of the body from the soul, rather it is a decoupling of the soul from the self. It is a place of sympathy, of approaching (an)other. For Annabelle and her artistic practice, this quest is ultimately about introducing the ritual and the belief into one’s life; it is about honouring and upholding life as sacred – through singing its infinite song and dancing its infinite dance.