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Get the slides from Matilde’s talks exploring the roots of consciousness, drawing, symbolic landscapes, and the primal spark of meaning-making. These PDFs are both souvenirs of thought and seeds for reflection, offered as a gesture of connection and mutual support.
This document contains both the slides and the extensive bibliography
Drawing as Encounter: Creative Practice & the Sacred
Tuesday 20th January 2026 > Interreligious Encounters & Creative Practice
funded by Religions for Peace UK + Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World, University of Edinburgh
Speaker: Matilde Gliubich Tomat (Bangor University)
This submission draws on my MRes research, On Encountering the Divine in the Act of Drawing, which explores how creative practice can serve as a mode of encountering the sacred. My work focuses on the act of drawing as an embodied, processual practice, in which the interplay between artist, material, and emerging work becomes a site of spiritual encounter. Rather than treating the drawing as a static artefact, I combine the physical act of mark-making with self-reflective practices to explore the lived experience of the sacred in real time.
The research situates these encounters at the intersection of materiality and the ineffable, demonstrating that while spiritual experiences can be partially articulated through creative practice, there remains a dimension of elusiveness that resists conventional description. This approach resonates with the conference’s emphasis on creative practice as a method for understanding religious encounters, as it foregrounds the experiential, rather than the purely representational, dimension of sacred interaction.
In a broader context, my practice contributes to alternative perspectives on the ways in which sacred and contested spaces are apprehended. By attending to the subtle dynamics of encounter between practitioner, medium, and emerging work, the project offers insights into how creative practices can mediate understanding of shared spiritual experiences, intersubjective engagement, and the permeability of boundaries between self and transcendent phenomena.
This submission therefore aligns with the conference theme by demonstrating that creative practice is not merely illustrative of religious experience but is itself a research-driven method that interrogates conventional notions of sacred interaction. Through drawing, I explore how encounters with the divine [or with the sacred more broadly] can be experienced, manifested, documented, and reflected upon, offering new ways of engaging with the unseen dimensions of spiritual coexistence and interaction in lived practice.
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I am very grateful to Interreligious Encounters & Creative Practice, Religions for Peace UK + Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World, University of Edinburgh, for giving me this opportunity to present my practice-led drawing research.
