The Yoni Mandalas

The Yoni Mandalas are Juanita Rea’s evolving body of place-responsive participatory artworks exploring belonging, ecology, embodiment, memory and collective repair.

Each manifestation begins with relationship: listening to landscape, local knowledge, cultural memory, materials, stories and the more-than-human world. Rather than reproducing a fixed design, every Yoni Mandala develops differently through its place and the people who become part of its making.

I Do Not Begin with an Artwork; I Begin with a Relationship

The Yoni Mandalas retain a coherent artistic architecture while remaining open to transformation. Circular and embodied forms, textiles, drawing, photography, natural and reclaimed materials, performance, meditative enquiry and collective making recur across the practice, but their meaning and form are determined by context.

Participation is not added after the artwork is conceived. It is one of the artistic media through which the work comes into being. A mark, stitch, spoken memory, image, movement, written reflection or act of attention may become part of an evolving collective form.

Relationship precedes artwork. Place is approached as a living collaborator rather than a neutral setting. The completed work carries the visible history of its making.