Primordial Pneuma

Aambr Newsome MFA thesis exhibition

Reception: May 1, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
April 27 - April 30, 2:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

What if the objects around us are not still, but waiting—holding memory, spirit, and intention within their form?

This thesis exhibition explores ancestral veneration as it manifests through the body, the object, and image-making. Rooted in the artist’s engagement with myth, ritual, and sacred objects, the work considers how animacy is transmitted—through acts of making, through the repetition of everyday gestures, and through the enduring presence of familial spirits.

Across printmaking, sculpture, and storytelling, the exhibition proposes that objects are not inert, but active participants in spiritual and material worlds. These works suggest that spirits traverse the boundaries between life and death, inhabiting forms that carry memory, intention, and lineage. In this space, objects perform alongside the body, echoing the body’s role as a vessel for the soul.

Drawing from Caribbean and Indigenous spiritual practices, the exhibition creates a site of convergence where ritual, narrative, and materiality collapse into one another. Here, the sacred is not separate from the everyday, but embedded within it—activated through presence, repetition, and belief.