Mythological journeys across ancient seas and sacred paths

Stories of wandering heroes have always called to something deep within us. Whether it is the wind-battered Greek sailor clinging to a fig tree or the wide-eyed merchant mariner tumbling out of a whale's belly, the mythic voyage has the texture of a dream we have all half-forgotten. Across cultures and centuries, artists have tried to put colour and form around that dream.

Imelda Almqvist works in paint the way a shaman walks between worlds. Her canvases open doorways into the imaginal realm, and the heroes who travel there — Odysseus threading past the Sirens, Sinbad bargaining with the roc — feel startlingly close to the modern soul. The result is art that does not decorate a wall but invites the viewer to step through it, the way one steps through a doorway in a Byron Bay share house and finds the salt wind on the other side.

Australia itself is a continent of mythic distance. Uluru rises out of the dust like a sleeping ancestor, and the coastal cliffs of the Great Ocean Road feel carved by wandering spirit-beings. For Australians, the hero's path is not an abstract idea from a far-off textbook — it is the Country underfoot, the saltwater in the lungs, the long drive across the Nullarbor with a thermos of tea in the cup holder and the radio tuned to a station that fades out somewhere near the WA border.

Imelda's paintings take that same long, listening quality and braid it through Norse, Mesopotamian and Mediterranean threads. Visitors to her site can wander themed collections the way a traveller might drift between outback roadhouses — each room a different weather, a different country of the soul.

Odysseus and the Mediterranean trials

The Greek hero's decade-long homecoming is a story about refusal. Odysseus rejects Calypso's offer of comfortable immortality, rejects the lotus-eaters' easy forgetfulness, and ties himself to the mast to hear what he should not hear. Imelda has long been drawn to this stubbornness — to the version of the hero who chooses suffering, and therefore meaning, over numb safety.

In her paintings, the Mediterranean becomes a character. The wine-dark sea carries faces as well as ships. A Cyclops eye glows from beneath a wave, and the shore of Scheria opens like a wound in the canvas, painted with the ochres and burnt siennas that a Central Australian painter would recognise as Country. The epic becomes weather, and the weather becomes something the viewer can stand inside.

Sinbad's seven voyages through Arabian Nights

If Odysseus is the iron-willed survivor, Sinbad is the wide-mouthed witness. The Baghdad merchant is hurled into impossible territories — magnetic mountains that pull the nails from his ship, valleys of diamonds guarded by serpents the size of fence posts. His voyages feel less like epic endurance and more like a string of initiations that happen to a willing fool.

Imelda treats Sinbad as a kind of trickster-friend. Her palette for these works leans into lapis, turmeric and the deep plum of a desert dusk. There is often a droll humour in them too, the wry recognition that life, like Sinbad's, rarely lets us plan more than one voyage ahead. The viewer leaves grinning, and slightly rearranged.

The hero's path as a universal blueprint

Joseph Campbell gave the wandering story a tidy shape, but Aboriginal songlines were already singing it into being across this continent tens of thousands of years earlier. The hero's path — departure, initiation, return — is not a Western copyright. It is the rhythm by which a young artist flies to Melbourne for a residency, or a painter leaves a quiet coastal town to study under teachers in another hemisphere. Fair dinkum, the blueprint is older than any of us.

Imelda's work honours that rhythm. She treats the hero's journey less as a narrative to illustrate than as a living current to swim with. The viewer is asked, gently, where they themselves stand on it, and whether the monster they are facing is really a monster or an old fear dressed in a new costume.

Sacred symbols carried across the oceans

Heroes do not travel with empty hands. They carry talismans — Odysseus's moly plant, Sinbad's lucky amulet, the woven bag of winds given to him by the Old Man of the Sea. Imelda's paintings are crowded with such objects, each one rendered with the slow attention of someone who believes symbols are not decorations but door-handles.

A shield painted for a client becomes a medicine object, which is why her guide to painting a medicine shield treats the work as ritual rather than craft. The numbers hidden in her compositions — phi ratios, fibonacci arcs, the spiral of a nautilus shell — are not maths homework either; they are the same pattern language the old painters of Uluru's caves used without needing a calculator.

Painting the Dreamtime and the outback

Australia's art market has its own weather. Country is sacred, and authentic Indigenous work is sold through Aboriginal-owned art centres in places like Alice Springs, Broome and the Tiwi Islands. The galleries of Paddington and Chippendale price serious premiums, and a casual "no worries" at the counter usually means there is, in fact, something to worry about later. Imelda, while working in a different idiom, is alert to this ethical texture — she listens before she paints.

Her Dreamtime paintings do not copy Country. They honour it. A red river running through a canvas might be the Nile, the Todd, or the blood of an initiate. The viewer is left to feel where the painting comes from, and that feeling is part of the medicine. Visitors curious about the geometry behind her work can explore her mathematics page, where number patterns are treated as ancestors.

Imelda's canvas and the mythic voyage

For collectors in Sydney, Perth and Hobart who want a painting that does more than match a sofa, the question is often where to begin. Imelda's site is laid out like a small museum of mythic currents, with themed rooms that name their influences plainly. Visitors can browse available work, read the poems that sometimes arrive alongside the paintings, and request pieces shaped to their own initiations.

Imelda's mythology curriculum flows through a wider educational project she shares with collaborators at Gestalt Projects, and her home gallery at Imelda's portfolio is the best starting point for anyone ready to bring a mythic voyage onto their own wall.

Workshops that bring mythic stories to life

For Australians who would rather paint than merely purchase, Imelda runs introductory two-day workshops and longer professional programmes in London and Pennsylvania, with online cohorts that suit a Brisbane or Adelaide winter. Students learn to read mythic stories the way painters read light — slowly, with the whole body, and with respect for the elders who carried the same stories long before them.

These are not art classes in the usual sense. They are more like the training a Sinbad or an Odysseus might have benefited from — guidance in how to read the signs, paint the monsters, and come home with the booty that actually matters.

Step inside the gallery, choose a canvas that calls your name, or sign up for the next workshop. The mythic voyage is still under sail, and there is a berth waiting.