Inspired by medieval spirituality and her own suffering, an artist exalts transformation

MONTCLAIR, N.J. — The monotypes that Sybil Archibald is known for are her daily practice. She rolls ink onto a flat surface, adds details with other pigments and objects, then lays a sheet of paper on top. The image pressed onto the paper is the result.

Archibald, 51, started the practice in the hospital. She was in her early twenties when she was diagnosed with scleroderma, an autoimmune disease that hardens the body’s tissues. It was expected to kill her about 25 years ago, but instead she used art to survive it and to express what she has learned from living with the illness.

Sybil Archibald. Photo by Micah Danney.

“Some people describe it like a mummification, which is why I’ve taken the mummy in some of the pieces and used it as a cocoon to transform into a moth,” Archibald said.

Her pieces are imbued with religious imagery, though she doesn’t identify with any particular religion. She earned a degree in medieval spirituality after her parents said no to art school. Archibald’s art is inspired by Sufi poetry, Plotinus’ “The Six Enneads,” St. Bonaventure’s writings on St. Francis of Assisi and the illustrations of Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen, and blended with her own struggle-tempered spirituality.

Her body of work spans mediums. With paintings, sculpture, prints and novel creations featuring light and sound, she meditates on the multilayered nature of reality. Through all of it runs a theme of transformation — how suffering can be turned into something else; a creative flow that neither begins or ends with any one person. Her pieces make visible the subtle connectedness of everything, always in motion.

“That’s life,” she said. “Life is about creation and change.”

Her work is on display at the exhibition “A Fish Cannot Drown in Water: The Inner Life of the Artist” in northwest New Jersey. The gallery, Clerestory Fine Art, is in the suburb of Montclair, 45 minutes by train from Manhattan, an enclave akin to Portland or Brooklyn and increasingly known as a hub for creatives in art, film, music, literature and journalism. Kathryn McGuire opened it to showcase the caliber of local artists like Archibald. 

“I was drawn to Sybil’s work,” said McGuire, who has a background in medieval art. “She’s compared to Leonard Baskin, who’s a very well-known printmaker. I collect Leonard Baskin.”

A portion of a Sybil Archibald painting. Photo by Micah Danney.

Archibald’s imagery can be jarring, McGuire said, but closer examination elicits more pleasant and profound feelings. 

Those are the feelings Archibald puts into the work, which she describes as a kind of therapy. Her process involves tuning in to something greater than herself to produce art that takes on meaning beyond her intentions whenever someone new lays eyes on it.

“What I’ve learned from that is the pieces are not for me,” she said. “You know, what’s for me is the moment where I’m working and I’m in that transformational energy.”

Micah Danney is a Poynter-Koch fellow and a reporter and associate editor for Religion Unplugged. He is an alumnus of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and has reported for news outlets in the NYC area, interned at The Times of Israel and covered religion in Israel for The GroundTruth Project.