I am an interdisciplinary artist with a professional theatre background. My working mediums include ceramics, mosaics, fibre, and photography. Recycled materials are essential to my life and work. The salvaged components within my artworks create transformative visual metaphors, where junk finds redemption and where that which is broken regains its integrity. I work across several media via pieced connections. Each element I make and gather together is dialoguing across time, cultures, and history. My work is of a piece. I enjoy the expansiveness of working with the multiplicity of elements and the visual significance and weight of the parts when viewed as a whole. The hunting and gathering of salvaged materials, along with the repetition of form through breaking, piecing, wrapping, cutting, shaping, and layering, surrounds my method with kinetic energy. Therefore, my connection with my materials is always visceral, organic, and elementally surprising. The act of reclaiming and mindfully hand-piecing is, for me, an active meditational practice. I experience an inner stillness of mind, body, and spirit connected to the beauty of sacred creativity. I sense that the resulting artwork becomes imbued with a devotional spirit. My approach is rooted in Zen arts philosophy and the process art movement, where the artist’s creative crossing and her physical actual work are recognized as inherent and valued aesthetics within the final artwork.
~Shelita Birchett Benash, MSW
The process of making The “Offering” ceramic sculpture series involves my working together with other ceramicists for several weeks outside in the weather that culminates into months. We are potters, hand-builders, and sculptors. We are kiln watchers. Kiln watching is physically dirty, full-bodied work. Kiln watching is also selfless, as our efforts are collectively alchemical. My Japanese wood-fired Anagama series explores active meditation and physical mantras. The resulting sculptural forms are compelling devotional reliquaries where the life, death, and life cycle find peace.”
— Shelita Birchett Benash, MSW
I am an interdisciplinary artist with a professional theatre background. My working mediums include ceramics, mosaics, fibre, and photography. Recycled materials are essential to my life and work. The salvaged components within my artworks create transformative visual metaphors, where junk finds redemption and where that which is broken regains its integrity. I work across several media via pieced connections. Each element I make and gather together is dialoguing across time, cultures, and history. My work is of a piece. I enjoy the expansiveness of working with the multiplicity of elements and the visual significance and weight of the parts when viewed as a whole. The hunting and gathering of salvaged materials, along with the repetition of form through breaking, piecing, wrapping, cutting, shaping, and layering, surrounds my method with kinetic energy. Therefore, my connection with my materials is always visceral, organic, and elementally surprising. The act of reclaiming and mindfully hand-piecing is, for me, an active meditational practice. I experience an inner stillness of mind, body, and spirit connected to the beauty of sacred creativity. I sense that the resulting artwork becomes imbued with a devotional spirit. My approach is rooted in Zen arts philosophy and the process art movement, where the artist’s creative crossing and her physical actual work are recognized as inherent and valued aesthetics within the final artwork.
~Shelita Birchett Benash, MSW
“Care, love, and patience must prevail; selfishness, haste, and outside commitments do not mix with these activities. One must delight in kiln-watching- a contemplative and hopeful time- but also must take care not to have a lapse in concentration. It is also a relaxed time. In Japan, kiln watchers often celebrate and drink sake. But it is also a religious time when the gods are involved.”
The process of making The “Offering” ceramic sculpture series involves my working together with other ceramicists for several weeks outside in the weather that culminates into months. We are potters, hand-builders, and sculptors. We are kiln watchers. Kiln watching is physically dirty, full-bodied work. Kiln watching is also selfless, as our efforts are collectively alchemical. My Japanese wood-fired Anagama series explores active meditation and physical mantras. The resulting sculptural forms are compelling devotional reliquaries where the life, death, and life cycle find peace. ”
— Shelita Birchett Benash, MSW
Make Your Peace.
The “Offering” Series, Japanese-wood fired ceramic forms, mixed media assemblage sculpture. 3.5’ X 28” W X 24” D.
by Shelita Birchett Benash
I am an interdisciplinary artist with a professional theatre background. My working mediums include ceramics, mosaics, fibre, and photography. Recycled materials are essential to my life and work. The salvaged components within my artworks create transformative visual metaphors, where junk finds redemption and where that which is broken regains its integrity. I work across several media via pieced connections. Each element I make and gather together is dialoguing across time, cultures, and history. My work is of a piece. I enjoy the expansiveness of working with the multiplicity of elements and the visual significance and weight of the parts when viewed as a whole. The hunting and gathering of salvaged materials, along with the repetition of form through breaking, piecing, wrapping, cutting, shaping, and layering, surrounds my method with kinetic energy. Therefore, my connection with my materials is always visceral, organic, and elementally surprising. The act of reclaiming and mindfully hand-piecing is, for me, an active meditational practice. I experience an inner stillness of mind, body, and spirit connected to the beauty of sacred creativity. I sense that the resulting artwork becomes imbued with a devotional spirit. My approach is rooted in Zen arts philosophy and the process art movement, where the artist’s creative crossing and her physical actual work are recognized as inherent and valued aesthetics within the final artwork.
~Shelita Birchett Benash, MSW
Say your peace.
Donna McCray McElroy (1968-2014) on Central Park Wedding Day, 1999, with Shelita Birchett Benash, Maid of Honor.
“Perhaps this is why we learn most about ourselves through devotion to others; why we become joyful and active as we respond to the formative forces in the materials in our crafts; potentialities call forth our own...”
“Our true nature is the nature of no birth and no death. We do not have to go anywhere in order to touch our true nature. The wave does not have to look for water because she is water. We do not have to look for God, we do not have to look for our ultimate dimension or nirvana, because we are nirvana, we are God.” ~Thich Nhát Hahn
The idea of a sculpture made of prayer beads came to me in a moment of searching for an action that would make a difference. I believe in the power of prayer. I also believe in the capacity for expressive art to facilitate positive emotions and healing energies. My dearest friend was diagnosed with a rare lymphoma. Donna and I were soul sisters. She let me into a small sacred circle. I became one of Donna’s primary caregivers at that time. Her husband had to keep their business going as it was just the two of them. I took Donna to her chemotherapy appointments over the 18 months of her battle with cancer. And she did battle. Making this intentional, meditative art work was a positive action that felt empowering in the face of acknowledging that I control nothing.
After Donna’s transition in 2014, I began providing support for hospice patients, families, and staff as a certified hospice volunteer and end of life doula. During those three years, a whole new world opened up to me. Like so many hospice volunteers, I was compelled to service as a natural part of the grieving process. However, on the first day of training, the other volunteers spoke about giving back because hospice took such tremendous care of their loved ones and families.
Then there was me; I came to hospice for answers. Donna’s transitioning and death experience was radically different from my caregiving experience for my father during two years of his terminal illness and transitioning when I was 20 years old. When Donna died I was left with so many questions. So, I went to hospice to learn about death and dying. I had such beautiful conversations with a rabbi, a priest, a Catholic nun, and a Buddhist nun around the universality of human beings and the stages of suffering and acceptance of transitioning and dying.
I found solace in the teachings of Thich Nhát Hahn during that time. From “No Death, No Fear” Hahn said, “We are afraid of death, we are afraid of separation, and we are afraid of nothingness. In the West, people are very afraid of nothingness. When they hear about emptiness, people are also very afraid, but emptiness just means that extinction of ideas. Emptiness is not the opposite of existence. It is not nothingness or annihilation.”
My nephew, Chadd, left this plane days after his 30th birthday on April 8, 2019. His was the first eulogy I had ever written. In August 2024, I wrote and delivered the second eulogy I had ever written for David, my sister Bridget's husband, Chadd's father. David happened to transition on my birthday, July 29, 2023. Bridget and David were high school sweethearts, together since they were 16. On December 12, 2023, Michael, David's younger brother, suddenly transitioned into his sleep. 2023 was a year of tremendous loss for my family.
My African American family has much in common with the traditional BIPOC family experiences around early death, cultural barriers to accessing mental health and physical health care while also succumbing to the detrimental impacts of low health literacy and toxic stress. I learned this lesson early, as I cared for my father during the two years of his terminal illness before he died at 46 years old.
I am passionate about love as health justice, increasing health literacy and collective wellbeing.
Meditative Photography by Shelita Birchett Benash
