The Practice
An Artist Who Works
at the Speed of Consciousness
Uriya Jurik does not separate making art from transforming lives. Her practice — spanning painting, photography, performance, sculpture, and large-scale immersive installation — runs in parallel with her work as a holistic life coach and guide for psychedelic preparation and integration. For Jurik, these are not different disciplines wearing different hats. They are a single continuous act: the conscious attempt to move human awareness forward.
At the centre of her visual work is an ancient, humble material: wool. Not wool as craft, nor as decoration, but wool as epistemology — a way of knowing through touch, through weight, through the accumulated memory of a material that has been inseparable from human survival since the earliest nomadic civilisations of Central Asia.
Jurik's ancestors came from exactly that world. And when she works with wool — felting, stretching, layering, draping, knotting — she describes it as something closer to communication than craft: a reaching back into DNA-encoded memories of people for whom this material made nomadic life possible, for whom it was shelter, warmth, and ceremony at once.
About the Practice
Jurik's award-winning installation Expanding Consciousness — which earned a Distinction in her MFA at the University of the Creative Arts, UK, and won 1st Prize at London Ultra 2019 — consists of visceral felted sculptures interconnected with rhizomatic tentacles evoking sensory nerves. It is simultaneously biological, geological, and intergalactic.
"True evolution doesn't happen in comfort zones — it happens in chaos."
— Uriya JurikMaterial Intelligence
Why Felt is the Universe's
Favourite Metaphor
Most fabrics obey machines. The width of the loom determines the width of the cloth. The intersection of threads is predictable, repeatable, mechanical. The organised world made textile. Jurik finds this analogy precise and troubling in equal measure — a piece of woven fabric as allegory for a civilisation that has confused control with progress, convenience with flourishing.
Felt is different. Felt has no edges. Its chaotic, ever-expansive structure means you can add to it from any point, at any time, and the surface remains even and continuous. There is no seam, no fixed dimension, no predictable grid. For Jurik, felt's alchemic constitution is not just a material property — it is a model for how the universe actually works.
In her practice, this means pushing wool beyond anything its history prepared it for. In some sculptures, wool serves as an epidermis — a warm organic skin stretched over forms made of polyurethane foam, a material as synthetic and contemporary as wool is ancient and nomadic. The two materials are opposites, and yet Jurik deploys them for the same purpose: insulation. The conceptual charge of this gesture is quiet but devastating.
In other works, she fluffs raw wool to create giant floating clouds, exploiting its raw ephemerality — its refusal to fix itself in space. And elsewhere she traces the full arc of the medium's transformations: raw to traditional to industrial to digital. Wool as civilisation in miniature. Wool as time itself, compressed into fibre.
The Felting Process
Felting requires long hours of monotonous, rhythmic labour — a quality Jurik describes as meditative by nature. Like shamanic drumming, the repetitive sound of the needle-felting tool propels her into expanded states of consciousness. The work is not separate from the spiritual practice. The making is the ceremony.
This meditation on material speaks to something deeper than aesthetics. For Jurik, the medium is inseparable from the message. If the work is about the interconnection of all things — the rhizomatic, non-hierarchical web of consciousness that ties every being to every other being — then the material itself must embody that logic. And felt, with its interlocking, directionless structure, its refusal of the edge and the seam, does exactly that.
Ancient Wisdom, New Physics
Where Shamans
Meet Quantum Theory
Jurik draws a direct line between the shaman and the artist — one that is not metaphorical but historical and anthropological. According to the earliest cave paintings and archaeological findings of anthropomorphic rock, clay, and bone statuettes, shamans have been utilising artistic techniques since the Upper Palaeolithic era. The impulse to mark, to make, to transmute material into meaning: this is one gesture with many names.
She found this argument crystallised in the Pavilion of Shamans at the 57th Venice Biennale, proposed by curator Christine Macel. Macel's articulation that "we live in a time where the need for care and spirituality is greater than ever" became, for Jurik, a kind of permission structure — a confirmation that the art world itself was beginning to remember what it had known.
But Jurik's framework is not purely traditional. She interweaves this ancient wisdom with the most contemporary shifts in scientific worldview — particularly quantum theory, with its insistence that observation shapes reality, that particles exist in superposition until measured, that entanglement defies the logic of separate things in separate places.
This intersection — quantum physics and shamanic epistemology — becomes the conceptual architecture of her immersive installations. Spaces that are in flux. That adapt to their container. That invite the viewer not to look at something, but to enter something — to use all their senses as instruments of knowing. "Understanding something intellectually," she notes, "is different from felt-sense or experience of the world." Her work insists on the latter.
"Like shamanic drumming, the rhythmic sound of a needle felting tool propels me to expanded states of consciousness."
— Uriya JurikThree Pillars
The Interwoven
Architecture of Her Work
In Jurik's practice, spiritual work, coaching and art-making are not separate pursuits — they are facets of a single method. Each informs and deepens the others.
01
The Ancestral Archive
Wool and bone as carriers of encoded memory. Working with these materials is an act of retrieval — drawing forward the intelligence of nomadic peoples who built entire civilisations from what they could carry.
02
The Shamanic Method
Repetitive, meditative labour as altered state. The felting process, like drumming, like ceremony, like the Amazonian dieta Jurik undertook in Peru — these are technologies for expanding the bandwidth of perception.
03
The Quantum Frame
Reality as participatory, relational, non-fixed. Immersive installations that refuse to be the same in any two spaces, that require the viewer's presence to become fully themselves — this is quantum logic made material.
On the World Right Now
The Deepest Healing
is a Return
Jurik does not separate her artistic diagnosis from her social one. The crisis of modernity, as she sees it, is a crisis of curriculum: a civilisation that educated the intellect while neglecting the body, the heart, and the irreducible fact of our interdependence with the natural world. Rampant consumerism, ecological collapse, epidemic loneliness — these are not separate problems. They are one problem wearing many faces.
The pandemic, for Jurik — who returned from an Amazonian Master Plant Dieta in Peru just before its onset — functioned as a kind of forced integration: a pause that the planet and its people may have needed more than they knew. She is careful not to romanticise suffering. But she is equally careful not to waste the lesson. "The coronavirus pandemic is a wakeup call for humanity," she says, "and a healing break for our planet."
What gives her hope is not institutional but intimate: the growing number of individuals who are taking responsibility for their own consciousness, their own healing, their own return to the source. "More people are waking up," she observes — and in the context of her life's work, that is not a cliché. It is the whole point.
On Marina Abramovic
Asked to name an icon of our time, Jurik names Marina Abramović — singling her out not for the body of work alone, but for what it demonstrates: the refusal to give up under pressure, under uncertainty, under collective panic. For Jurik, endurance is its own form of courage.
Favourite Quote
"No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."
— Albert Einstein, as cited by Uriya JurikIn Closing
An Art That
Remembers Everything
What Uriya Jurik is making is not decorative and not didactic. It occupies a rarer space: the visceral, the experiential, the genuinely transformative. Her installations do not ask to be admired from a distance. They ask to be entered — with the full body, the full nervous system, the full willingness to be altered by what you find inside.
In an art world increasingly dominated by the conceptual and the ironic, her work insists on sincerity. On the reality of the unseen. On the possibility that a piece of wool, handled with intention, with knowledge, with ancestral memory and quantum curiosity — can do what the oldest human art always did: move consciousness forward.
People are nostalgic, Jurik observes — craving real, tangible experiences and genuine connection. She is not nostalgic in a retrograde sense. She is nostalgic in the deepest etymological sense: a longing to return home. And home, in her cosmology, is not a place but a state: the felt-sense of being fully present, fully interconnected, fully awake to the miracle of existing inside a universe that is — like felt, like consciousness itself — infinite in every direction.
Visit Uriya Jurik's work at uriyajurikgallery.com
