Rune casting as a compositional language in sacred painting

A rune cast is not a fortune-telling parlour trick. In the shamanic tradition that Imelda Almqvist works within, throwing tokens across a cloth is a conversation between the visible and the invisible. Each carved piece carries a name, a sound, and an atmosphere, and the pattern on the cloth is read as a composition rather than as a sentence. For a painter, that pattern becomes the first draft of an image, a set of instructions about where weight, light, and silence belong.

This way of working treats the canvas as a place where symbols organise rather than decorate. A rune drawn or painted steers the eye, holds a charge, marks a threshold between one state and another. The composition that grows around it breathes around the symbol rather than smothering it.

In Australia, this approach sits in unexpected dialogue with the visual grammar of Aboriginal desert works, where dot fields and concentric forms are likewise used to map songlines and ancestral memory. A few collectors in Sydney's inner west and along the Mornington Peninsula have begun collecting works with this layered vocabulary, and the market for art carrying ceremonial weight is quietly growing in Fitzroy and Fremantle.

This piece looks at how symbols function inside a finished painting, how the gesture of the cast shapes the canvas, and how practitioners in the Southern Hemisphere are beginning to engage with this lineage on their own terms.

The gesture behind the glyph

The cast itself can be as simple as a handful of elder wood or clay pieces scattered from a leather pouch, though many use seedpods or river-tumbled stones. The reading happens the moment they settle. Positions matter, gaps matter, the way one piece catches another matters. The hand that threw them has already done the work of a brush, and the cloth underneath has done the work of the gesso ground.

What follows is translation. The pattern is lifted into graphite, then ink, then pigment. Nothing is added for ornament. The composition is faithful to the cast, which means the finished painting carries the same asymmetries, the same clusters of weight, the same surprising voids the cast revealed. Rune-cast paintings feel received rather than invented.

Reading symbols in the pictorial field

Once a symbol lands on the canvas, it behaves like a small gravitational body. Other forms orbit it or fall away from it. Imelda works with this principle directly, allowing a single strong mark to dictate the rhythm of everything around it. The result is a composition that reads in pulses rather than paragraphs.

There is a discipline in this that painters often resist. It asks the maker to honour what has appeared rather than redraft it. A symbol that lands off-balance must be honoured by a canvas that learns to be off-balance around it. The finished work gains a quality of arrival, as though it has always been there and the painter has merely uncovered it.

Mapping the Australian landscape

Australian painters working with this symbolic language often find themselves drawn to the ochres of the outback, the iron reds of the Pilbara, the chalky whites of the Coorong. These are pigments with a ceremonial history that long predates any gallery circuit. Working with them changes how a rune sits inside the frame, because the ground itself begins to speak.

In practical terms, the market for this work in Australia is small but attentive. Buyers tend to come through word of mouth rather than auction rooms, and serious collectors travel to regional centres like Castlemaine or the quiet studios of the Southern Highlands. Anyone keen to explore this field would do well to read about natural pigments before committing to a particular palette.

Four currents of elemental composition

A rune-cast painting is rarely a single temperature. It holds several currents at once, the way a riverbed holds cold water, warm silt, and bright gravel in the same stretch. Imelda has written thoughtfully about how the elements in mixed media move through a finished work, and this four-fold frame is useful for any painter working symbolically. Water favours wash and drip, fire favours sudden brightness, earth favours weight, air favours thin dry strokes.

Holding all four at once is harder than it sounds. The composition must allow each element its own territory, while still letting them bleed into one another at the edges. This is where the rune cast earns its keep: the cast shows where the boundaries between states belong.

When the cast refuses to settle

Not every cast arrives cleanly. Sometimes the pieces clump, scatter too widely to form a pattern, or fall in a way that contradicts the question held in the heart. A painter cannot pretend the cast is always eloquent. It has moods, and some are unhelpful. A good practitioner reads frustration, avoidance, or simple tiredness into the pattern rather than throwing again until something prettier appears.

The composition that follows may be harsher, more angular, less pleasing to look at. It may carry a quality of refusal that is hard to sell. Yet it is often the work the painter returns to with gratitude, years on. For any Australian artist working in this tradition, the point is worth sitting with: the market rewards the decorative, but a rune cast rewards the faithful.

Words that sit beside the image

A painting made from a rune cast often calls out for language alongside it, not to explain the image but to keep it company. Many practitioners write short poems to sit beside the work, almost the way a viewer pauses. Imelda's own poems on loss show how the written fragment can extend a painting without describing it.

This habit resonates strongly with Australian writers and makers, where ekphrastic practice and the short lyric have a long standing tradition. For anyone curious about writing beside visual work, the reflective essays at Emily's site offer a generous entry point. The pairing of image and text is not a marketing tactic; it completes what the cast began.

If you feel called to explore sacred art training with Imelda, the introductory two-day courses and longer professional programmes in London and Pennsylvania are listed on the site, and the gallery holds original rune-cast works available for collection. Browse the current collection, choose a piece that finds you, and bring it home.