OPEN CALL:

Open Call: Transformation, Ritual, Renewal

Marmo invites artists to contribute works responding to the intertwined themes of transformation, ritual, and renewal. The exhibition takes as its point of departure the myth of Persephone: her descent into the underworld each autumn, her time below, and her return with the spring.

This cyclical movement between worlds speaks to the rhythms of change and endurance: decay and germination, grief and restoration, and endings that fold imperceptibly into beginnings. We are drawn to the idea of descent not as disappearance, but as a necessary deepening, a gathering of seeds, gestures, and knowledge in the dark.

Through this exhibition, we seek to explore how ritual can take form within an artwork; how gestures, marks, and materials might carry the residue of transformation, repetition, and renewal. The focus is on process as well as on the presence of ritual as it manifests in the work: the threshold between the symbolic and the physical, the seen and the unseen.

We welcome submissions across mediums including painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, mixed media, photography, and textile-based work. Pieces may approach the theme through mythic, ecological, or personal frameworks, through the body’s memory, the ritual of repetition, the cycles of the natural world, or the unseen labor of renewal.

Subjects of interest include: descent and return, ritual gestures, underworlds and thresholds, metamorphosis, decay and germination, mythic temporality, process and repetition, grief as renewal, the body as vessel, light and shadow, seasonal cycles, dream and material, acts of devotion, transformation through making, myth as ecological language, ritual as daily practice, and the creative process as initiation.

This call is open to all who wish to respond to the season’s turning. We invite works that trace transformation not only in subject but also in process; the way a material alters under pressure, or how a practice changes its maker.

As the year descends into fall, Transformation, Ritual, Renewal becomes a space for reflection on what lives beneath the surface and the slow alchemy of becoming.