Hilma af Klint was an innovator of early abstraction. Born in Sweden in 1862, her work was inspired by the theosophical movement, spiritual searching, metaphysics, and botany. She led a spiritualist group called The Five (1902-1908). This group consisted of five women who made collaborative drawings during meetings or séances. Their experiments with automatic drawing took place decades before the Surrealists’ first publicized this practice as an avant-garde performance. While the improvisatory marks of Surrealist drawings were said to come from the practitioners’ subconscious, The Five channeled supposed spirits, making work that contained their outside esoteric messages.

The process of making the line drawings for this artist book was influenced by these experiments in shared mediation and meditation. They were made collaboratively over three sunny April afternoons around Ariel’s kitchen table in Queens. - Miniature Garden