Beth Benson

Using everyday materials, things found on the ground or stuff otherwise thrown away, I weave webs of intention and possibility. I keep my hands moving and let what comes come through.

Sometimes, as a result of my training in Art and Healing availed through the now mythic Arts & Consciousness Program in the Berkeley Arts Annex of JFKU, i set an intention, forget it, allow my hands to move through their touch healing processes, find and follow only pleasure, move from joy to joy as i explore materials, textures, colors layering and co-collaborating with the healing and storytelling the process makes into symbolic, manifest, co-created, divinihuman reality.

Once the “thing” emerges, the symbol exists, i can then engage with it as a thing wholly separate and “born” from me. I ask it for its knowing. I ask it what it needs. I become the hands that serve it and help it find its places where it can do its work in this world.

I write, record, photograph, collage with the parts and pieces of the thing and its process of becoming. I share stories of its making and our continued deepening and learning in worded forms that disappear on breath or glint at the edges of memory and leave as pieces in the body of the sacred witnessing assembly for their own retellings.

I use the thing of the things i make, the flotsam and jetsam of the ephemeral to talk about temporality, ecology, the climate and its call to us to turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes in time to survive and celebrate life.

SERIAL GALLERY-IST & FOUNDER OF

ART EXPERIENCE CENTERS

Beth opened her first gallery in Los Angeles in 1987, and has been a founder for unique arts experience and education spaces ever since. She's co-created creative spaces in LA, London, Kansas City, San Francisco, Oakland's Fruitvale/Jingletown, Pacifica and now Crestline, California.

TRANSFORMATIVE ARTIST

Beth earned her MA in Transformative Art from the Department of Arts & Consciousness at JFK University when the program was in the Berkeley Arts Annex. Beth went on to begin and then abandon her PhD pursuits in Women’s Spirituality in the School of Philosophy & Religion at California Institute of Integral Studies.

Intentional improvisational collaboration is Beth’s favorite art form.

CRESTLINE CREATRIX MATRIX

Beth Benson, @artmakerpoet, now calling herself the Crestline Creatrix, is a Transformative Artist using every day art materials and sacred intention to weave webs of connection for the healing, hopeful experience of her clients, collaborators, readers and viewers.

Beth bravely explores her own connections in hyper personal confessional writing about the internal, relationship, family, community and ecological truths that inform the contrasts and intersections inside climate and political realities. She consciously collaborates with her facebook readership to create community and publish everyish day.

She, installed as founder and facilitator in the www.crestlinecreatricsmatrix.com, is her best work-in-progress to date.