Nancy Messegee
Nancy Messegee is a movement, text, and textile artist living in Austin, where she is dedicated to fully inhabiting, exploring, and delighting in the sacred spaces of body, home, and world within an iterative creative practice. She grew up in a village of 750 residents in Alaska, which she left to attend and then graduate from Yale. She has road tripped through every one of the 50 United States, witnessing in their vast complexity both sorrow and beauty. Her decades of deep work as a teacher and parent reflect her ongoing fascination with and commitment to human growth and development, to the mystery and power within liminal spaces, and to the transformative potential of somatic and textual experience. She is the founder and owner of Enchanted Rock Studios.
“My current creative research around female aging explores gerotranscendence through autotelic experience. I’m drawn to the extrarational as a source for revealing the resonant meaning in circumstances; I’m inspired by the quantifiable as a source for validating felt experiences. My art praxis is transdisciplinary: I create personal rituals of movement and words, repeated forms that exist to strengthen connection to the mystical and to reveal conditions within, as the familiar context holds space for the content’s progression. As the forms are repeated, their inherent benefits accumulate and expand, and mind, body, and spirit release and transform, revealing new details and deepening intensity for the next cycle. Even mundane tasks and ordinary vessels can become transcendent experiences and sacred spaces through the application of the mindful purpose of ritual. I’m fascinated by developmental, physical, and metaphorical liminality and by ritual’s ability to both mark and prompt these various forms—to loosen the grip on the last stage and increase momentum toward the next one—where conscious process evolves into useful outcome. My autotelic research investigates, inspires, and illuminates gerotranscendence through breath work, yin yoga, yoga nidra, poetry, creative writing, pilgrimage walking, and my original textile art form of garment mapping.”