Stoneart-Exhibitions

DREAMWOODS: WHERE ART MEETS MEDITATION AND NATURE

Visit the beautiful “Dreamwoods,” hidden in the heart of Tuscany. This forest-gallery provides a unique experience for lovers of nature and of art, as well as for people who know, or would like to know, their inner reality too.
Around a hundred stone sculptures – some majestic or mysterious, some touching, and others playful – have been placed along the myriad, labyrinthine pathways that weave their way across the gentle mountain surface.
The artist, Deva Manfredo, has attempted to create a world of harmony, in which all life forms are respected. He appreciates the innate perfection of the stones (most of them collected from various parts of Italy). As he sees it, his creativity lies in simply drawing attention to their beauty, their individuality, and their primeval energy by placing them alone, in combinations with each other, or by trees. A meditator of 25 years, Manfredo says, “I would like visitors to leave with not just a visual impression of the forest but also with a taste or fragrance of the inner space which inspired it.”

"The stones of Deva Manfredo are part of an imposing mosaic, which embraces all the dimensions of the space, with symbolic configurations, mysterious pathways, unsettling statues, palaces and fairy-temples and finally complex cities with architectonical structures like courtyards, passages, towers, monumental gates..." "It isn´t easy to express with words what we see in front of us, but our soul knows it precisely, our remembering knows these forms, the most forgotten stratums in our consciousness get hit immediately- the contact happens in an instant. We don´t know how and why, but it´s evident that we are exposed to an immediate fascination like lightning. The message arrives without any mediation: it is beyond reason and control. It´s significant to see how in front of these landscapes the more abused terms dissolve like `culture, sculpture, archtitecture, land art, archeology, artcraft´ or simply `play´or even `religion´: something before (or after?) the art. This is the most interesting and unsettling aspect: You get the feeling to be the first person who has arrived on planet earth, at the very beginning of the world."
-Anna Casserino da Como-