About

Sarah "Gigi" Konecki-Brazeal is a Graduate student at Arizona State University pursuing a master's in art history and is passionate about art, material culture, human history, and archaeology.

In addition to her academic pursuits, Konecki-Brazeal is an active member of the Antiochia ad Cragum Archaeological Research project in Gazipasa, Turkey. As a field team member, she helps with fieldwork and archaeological illustration efforts, contributing to an ever-growing body of research about the region and the ancient Roman city. Additionally, she is a member of the Bandafassi Regional Archaeological Project at ASU. Currently, she works in the Bandafassi lithics lab at Arizona State University, analyzing artifacts, compiling data, and creating academic illustrations for the project.

Konecki-Brazeal is also a practicing artist working in metal fabrication and textiles. As an artist working with steel and fiber, her work is based on her academic research and explores lost themes of hermeticism and the occult. Konecki-Brazeal is particularly interested in the symbolism of triangles, alchemy, and the occult, as well as the number three and the dichotomy of dark vs light. For her, the interplay between the strength of metal and the delicacy of fiber is a fascinating area of exploration and allegorical to the human fascination with light vs. dark. As an artist, she is drawn to the contrast between these two materials and the unique qualities they bring to her work. Konecki-Brazeal attempts to create pieces that showcase the beauty and complexity of this contrast in materials/ideology and illustrate how these near-universal themes appear in the spiritual and artistic culture of civilizations throughout time and geography. 

From Classical Antiquity to the surrealists of the 20th century, humans seem to be keenly interested in their connection to the spiritual world and how one may attain the hidden knowledge of the celestial realm. From alchemy to automatic writing, scholars, scientists, magicians, and artists have all – perhaps unknowingly – been searching for the elusive conduit to the divine. The alchemists recorded their divine quest in countless codified images and works the likes of Atalanta Fugiens, while men like Carl Jung posited a collective consciousness that resides in us all and is wholly reachable if we only take the time to connect ourselves to the universe. No matter the scientific or artistic endeavor, the name, or the prescribed practice of divination, all of these thinkers throughout time have been seeking a way to tap into divine knowledge and, in doing so, discover the secrets of existence: alchemist, necromancer, witch, black magician, psychoanalyst, and surrealist are, in the end, all on a quest for enlightenment through divine knowledge, their only difference is how they chose to get there. Konecki-Brazeal hopes that her works will embody these lost themes of hermetic knowledge and that one day, we may rediscover the missing connection between scientific truth and occult knowledge. The quest for the knowledge of the universe is, and always has been, a marriage of the spiritual and the scientific.