Journeying to the Lower World Through Sacred Painting

For thousands of years, shamanic practitioners have deliberately entered altered states of consciousness to descend into what is often called the Lower World, a realm beneath the surface of ordinary reality where animal guides, ancestors, and elemental forces wait to share their wisdom. This practice, documented across Siberian, Amazonian, Scandinavian, and many other traditions, is more than folklore; it is a disciplined path of inner exploration. Contemporary painters have begun to give this invisible terrain a visual language, turning transient visions into works that can be hung on a wall and revisited.

Australians carry a particular sensitivity to underworld imagery, given the profound presence of Aboriginal Tjukurpa narratives that describe ancestral beings slipping beneath the sandstone of places like Uluru and the Bungle Bungles, later emerging transformed. In urban galleries from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra through to smaller spaces in Fitzroy and Newtown, viewers find artworks that draw from this wellspring. The intersection of ancient practice and contemporary painting feels right at home on this continent, where the land itself remembers its own depths.

Imelda Almqvist approaches the canvas as a wayfinder, mapping territories visited during her own journeys and the journeys she guides others through. Her work offers a visual entry point for those who wish to understand what lower world travel feels like from the inside, even before they step onto a drum-led journey themselves.

The shamanic descent and its ancient roots

Lower world journeying is a foundational practice in many shamanic traditions, distinct from journeys to the upper or middle worlds. Practitioners typically use repetitive percussion, breathwork, or darkness to shift awareness, then visualise themselves entering the earth through a tree root, a cave entrance, a crack in the rock, or a body of water. Once below, they meet allies who offer teaching, healing, or protection.

In Aboriginal Australian law, comparable descents are encoded in songlines that travel through country. The Rainbow Serpent of the Western Desert is said to have carved out the gorges of Nitmiluk by sliding beneath the surface. These stories are not abstract mythology but living instructions about how to relate to the land. Painters working today often acknowledge this lineage, whether their practice is explicitly indigenous or draws from cross-cultural shamanic sources.

Visual language of the underworld

Painting an invisible place presents a curious challenge. The Lower World is rarely depicted as threatening in Imelda's work; instead, it appears as a place of luminous meeting, lit from within. Curving shapes suggest cave walls, while repeated motifs evoke drumbeats made visible. Figures sometimes emerge from behind layers of pigment, mirroring the way a guide appears slowly during a real descent.

Feminine imagery plays a significant role in these paintings, with many works honouring the regenerative wisdom held in the earth. The deeper exploration of sacred feminine goddess imagery in contemporary painting reveals how artists across the world are reclaiming ancient symbols of descent, including Inanna, Persephone, and the Cailleach.

Sacred symbols and their meanings

Caves that travel to the underground, water that flows both above and below, serpentine forms that bridge realms, and root systems that anchor the visible to the hidden are recurring motifs across shamanic art. In Australia, ochre deposits used by desert painters were once mined from deep pits, and the colour itself carries the memory of the earth's interior.

Symbols function as visual shorthand for those who have journeyed, but they also speak to viewers who have not. A painted cave entrance invites contemplation. A river running downward suggests that what lies beneath is not empty, only waiting to be acknowledged.

Colour as a portal to hidden realms

Colour carries much of the emotional weight in lower world imagery. Deep indigos, charcoal blacks, and rich ochres dominate the palette, suggesting both the density of earth and the glow of inner fire. Imelda often layers translucent washes so that something luminous appears to burn through the surface, much like the way a campfire in the Kimberley reveals itself against the night sky.

The impulse to paint the unseen is as old as pigment itself. A deeper look at painting the void reveals how artists negotiate the challenge of representing infinity, absence, and the formless on a finite surface, a tension that lies at the heart of every lower world canvas.

Power animals and ancestral guides

Snakes, big cats, wolves, and birds of prey are the most commonly reported guides during lower world journeys, though regional traditions add local creatures. Australian practitioners often meet saltwater crocodiles, goannas, or ancestral kangaroo spirits, animals tied to the country's waterways and rock shelters.

Imelda's paintings feature these animal allies with a recognisable presence, neither sweet nor threatening, simply present. They sit beside human figures or move through layered landscapes, suggesting companionship rather than conquest. Collectors in Australia, whether in the coastal galleries of Brisbane or the quieter rooms of Hobart, often respond to this quality of respectful encounter.

Paintings as maps of inner territory

For someone who has never journeyed, a painting can function as a map, hinting at the texture of an experience they may eventually seek. For the experienced practitioner, the same painting becomes a familiar landmark, a place to return to in meditation. The artwork itself becomes a threshold.

The Australian market for spiritually engaged art stays comparatively small but devoted, with collectors happy to have a yarn over pieces that find their way into home altars, healing spaces, and quiet rooms. Prices reflect the labour of layered work and the time spent in actual journey before pigment meets canvas, and most buyers see the purchase as a long-term relationship rather than a quick transaction.

Working with these images in daily life

A painting of the Lower World is not meant to hang passively. It can sit on a small altar, be used as a focal point during meditation, or be carried into a dream to extend the conversation begun on canvas. Some collectors place a corresponding crystal beneath the frame, where the work's light seems to anchor the room's quiet energy.

Across Australia, from meditation circles in Mullumbimby to artist studios in the Adelaide Hills, people are finding ways to weave these images into ordinary life. The Lower World, once visited, tends to keep calling.

Browse the available paintings in the gallery, choose a piece that calls to you, or step onto the path yourself through the sacred art training courses offered for beginners and practitioners across London, Pennsylvania, and online. Your journey begins the moment you decide it does.