available in 12" x 9" and 9" x 6" formats, custom printed on heavy paper
ALSO AVAILABLE: 8.25 x 10 in. format printed on standard paper
Norma Churchill, now in her late 80s, experienced a remarkable series of visions beginning in the 1970s. She has presented her work at conferences on shamanism and at Jung Institutes, and she has published in Jung Journal and The Shamans Drum.
Norma has spent the last two decades distilling her experience and choosing among her hundreds of paintings on rice paper, in preparation for this book.
The late analyst and scholar of shamanism and Navaho healing ceremonies, Donald Sandner, was Norma's friend and mentor. Dr. Sandner lectured on her visions: their symbolism and their significance for contemporary culture.
This is a narrative of symbolic journeys in which Churchill was shown the wounds lying beneath the "progress" of modern culture. Her paintings take us with her into the presence of the beings and scenes she encountered. Norma is a participant in her visions, and she depicts herself in her paintings, showing us the surprise, wonder, ecstasy, and intense, physically-felt suffering of her visionary experience.
Excerpts from two Reviews:
Review by Marion Anderson
Analytst Member of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles
and Teaching Member, Sandplay Therapists of America/ISST
"I was absorbed and deeply affected by Norma Churchill's paintings of her visions. I needed to look at the impactful images many times before I was ready to read the accompanying text. The visions first spoke to me nonverbally. Then reading the text and how the visions came about, I realized that the text amplified the visions. ...
I applaud her courage to publicly share this intimate material centered around the development of the archetypal feminine. ...
I hope Journey to Snakewoman will touch you as deeply as it touched me. It is an invitation to contact and stay connected with the nonverbal realm. .."
Journal of Sandplay Therapy 30 (1), 2021.
REVIEW by MAGGIE BARON
Private Practice, London
A Founding Member of the British and Irish Sandplay Society and former Board Member of ISST
Journey to Snakewoman, visions experienced, painted, written and reflected upon by Norma Churchill, is not a book you read but texts and images with which you dwell. In doing so the vibrancy of colours and the travelling of distances are absorbed as one makes one's acquaintance with the many visitations of Norma's journey and share in the incredulity of her experiencing in the territories of the dark and light worlds. ...
... This exquisitely produced book is so well designed that it enables one to enter it and begin by looking at the expressive paintings that are on offer...I began with just the images to become familiar with their presences. I found myself allured by their colours and absolutely fascinated by the details of these paintings. I learned to read the emotions being experienced in the visions, through the way in which Norma painted the eyes of the figure representing herself. ... I was soon to know that this journey was not about something frivolous, it was not someone playing around as if the psyche offered superficial entertainment. ...
Just as with Jung in Liber Novus, you witness the psychic demands which really address the human endeavour in its search for right relation to the mystery of being.