Illuminating the Unconscious

Through dreamwork and medieval art traditions, Margaret Humphris maps the soul’s journey

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Visual & Performing Arts

To Baton Rouge artist Margaret Humphris, life—and the ongoing work of consciously living it—are creative processes. “We are creating ourselves,” she said, “step by step, as we go.”

Recently retired from a twenty-two-year career as a clinical social worker with LSU Mental Health Services, Humphris’s interests in psychology and healing developed parallel to her art—even before she realized the connections. As a teenager, she’d document her dreams and illustrate them. “I didn’t know what else to do with them, but it helped me manage some of that energy,” she said. “I always sensed that there was really great meaning there, but I didn’t know what to do with it, or how to mine it.”

In college, she began studying Carl Jung and learning more about the mysteries of the unconscious mind. “I started trying to find ways to make sense of the dream symbols, as well as the symbols all around us,” she said. “We are getting information from the world in our consciousness constantly, and so to be able to catch those messages when they come, and honor them . . . it’s a great gift.”

To this day, in her practice as an artist, Humphris goes through “collecting phases,” in which she gets quiet and listens, gathering ideas. “I’ve done the process enough now to know to trust it, that my unconscious knows where it’s going, even if my ego doesn’t,” she said. When the “gifts” come to her, it is sometimes in the form of poetry, or images she captures with her camera throughout the day. Often it simply comes into her mind, and when she can, she sketches it on whatever scraps of paper she can find—receipts, napkins.

For quite some time, she’s been preoccupied with the cycles of descent and rising within the human experience—challenges that she believes, often, can be transformative and draw us closer to spiritual wholeness. “We all, to some extent, are going to have these ups and downs … some being really deep, some just the little ups and downs throughout the day,” she said. “But we can try to build ourselves back up again and then have these moments of great wonder and joy. It’s hard to have the ‘up’ without the ‘down.’ We can’t have the light without the dark. And the brighter the light, the darker the shadows. It all goes hand in hand.”

In a series of artworks exhibited at Baton Rouge Gallery this past summer, Humphris envisions a version of this journey within the Medieval tradition of illuminated manuscripts.

She began painting in this style around ten years ago, when she was working through the grief of losing her brother. “I knew that whatever I was going to do to kind of express my love and grief had to be so sacred,” she said. She had been admiring illuminated manuscripts for almost fifty years at that point, captivated by the beauty and the detail and the intimacy of them. When a vision of Avalon, of the Arthurian legend, came to her, she realized that the style could be a way to express what she was going through. “Because both the subject and the methodology were so personal, emotional, and sacred, it was quite intimidating to begin, though it immediately felt ‘right.’

Her 2025 series, Unfinished Journey, includes six paintings that Humphris said can certainly be experienced individually, but were conceived as part of a story altogether—a manuscript of sorts. Each tableau is framed by adornments and symbols, often drawn from nature. “The theory is that you start out with some sort of confusion, or something that sets us off, falling into the depths,” she said.

“Falling,” is indeed where the story begins, beneath a stormy sky in which the sun is only just beginning to break through. A figure has lost their footing atop a wooden boat, the fall just beginning, while a companion looks on. In the next painting, we see the figure, now drenched in the sun’s piercing rays, descending deep into darkness—“and we don’t know how long we’ll be down there,” said Humphris. “We don’t know yet if we will continue to sink, or if we will swim, or if we’ll receive help.”

The answer comes in “Up for Air,” in which an arm reaches into the water and grasps the hand of our sunken heroine. In the ornate illumination, the word “Believe” frames the moment.

“But the story isn’t over,” said Humphris. “Unfinished Journey (Shedding Skin)” depicts a woman making her way to shore, just as the sun is setting. “She’s still trudging, you know. It’s a struggle. Even though you’re up and breathing air again, you’ve still got hard work ahead, you’ve got to get back to terra firma.” The scene is bordered by a frame of vines, angels, and lizards—the last with their skin peeling off at their tails. “We go through these transformations,” explained Humphris. “We have to let go of our old identities, our senses of self, in order for new skins to grow. And it could be painful. But she’s charging ahead.”

"For quite some time, she’s been preoccupied with the cycles of descent and rising within the human experience—challenges that she believes, often, can be transformative and draw us closer to spiritual wholeness."

The next painting is anchored by a bright, brilliant star, held in place by a man clothed only in red pants. This moment in the journey, explained Humphris, is where we sometimes are fortunate enough to receive a gift; in her case, that gift is in the form of inspiration. “A dream, a person, some type of insight from something bigger than us,” she said. The star itself came to her as an epiphany, revealing the Unfinished Journey series to her as a whole. “It couldn’t be any other star,” she said.   

The series ends with a dancer, hair blowing in a turbulent wind. Titled, “Dancing in the Storm,” the painting represents, for Humphris, the strength such a journey can grant a person—the ability to dance through the storms, to see them for what they are: opportunities to transform, to grow. “There will, of course, be some storms that are too big, where we can’t dance,” she acknowledged. But when we can, “I think it’s as  fine a job as we can do to express that joy and awareness that this storm, too, shall pass.” 

See more of Humphris's work at batonrougegallery.org/margaret-humphris.