Sacred Arts 2025: Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Artistic Expression

Ever since the dawn of time, there has been an art-based approach to spirituality. People have created and developed ritualistic relationships with artefacts in order to help them understand, express, and communicate with the divine. From jewellery to iconography, music, garments, sculptures, architecture, incense, and more, these objects of art have encapsulated and preserved religious symbols and traditions over many generations.

This conference aims to bring together researchers, postgraduate students, and creatives interested in the role that religious artefacts and rituals can play in our perception of the sacred. In this transdisciplinary forum, we will be sharing ideas relating to all aspects of art and the divine, especially regarding matter, materials, and materiality in religious cultures throughout the ages. Art is associated with religious traditions around the world, and sacred objects/artefacts (such as icons, sculptures, jewellery, garments, architecture, etc.) have the capacity to depict and describe archetypal, spiritual concepts and religious content through matter. We would like to explore topics revolving around the connection between religions and material culture, especially in observing the relationships between people and sacred artefacts, whether these relationships are of spiritual, informative, creative, scientific or ekphrastic nature.

We would like to explore the following questions: How can religious artefacts shape our understanding of the divine? What type of ekphrastic responses may be generated between different mediums of religious art? What factors come into play in the making and development of iconography and other art of religious significance? How can archaeological findings tell us more about the history of the sacred in our psyche?