Wheels of Color, Spirals of Light

Para Winingham’s Hand Crafted Mandalas

Para Winingham’s mandala-based artwork explores the interconnectedness of the physical, natural, and metaphysical worlds through repetition, geometry, and symbolic pattern. Drawing inspiration from Celtic and Arabic designs, Celtic mythology, cosmological concepts, and the elemental forces of air, water, fire, earth, and ether, Winingham creates intricate visual systems that invite contemplation and encourage a sense of harmony, balance, and wholeness.

At the center of her practice is the circle, the fundamental structure of the mandala. For Winingham, the circle embodies completeness, equality, grounding, safety, and centeredness. Its continuous form also evokes the perpetual ebb and flow of life: cycles of movement, transformation, awakening, and renewal. Within these circular compositions, repeated lines and motifs become pathways through which the viewer can wander, pause, and discover relationships between seemingly separate forms.

The artist’s fascination with maze-like patterns is particularly significant. Following the interwoven threads of Celtic designs becomes a metaphor for searching beneath the surface of things, tracing the unseen connections that bind individual experiences to a larger whole. The maze is not simply a puzzle with an endpoint, but a visual meditation on the process of finding one’s way, through complexity, uncertainty, and continual change.

Winingham’s practice extends this exploration across both paper and fabric. Her hand-drawn mandalas, rendered in acrylic, pencil, and watercolor pencil, emphasize the meditative act of mark-making and the precision of repeated pattern. In her fiber works, painted and stenciled fabrics are further transformed through drawing, stitching, quilting, beading, and the incorporation of symbolic objects. These layered processes turn pattern into a tactile experience, allowing line, color, thread, and material to function together as forms of visual and physical connection.

With more than five decades of artistic practice spanning painting, fiber arts, film and animation, installation, performance, and decorative arts, Winingham brings an expansive understanding of image-making to her current mandala series. Her work reflects a lifelong interest in the ways art can transform symbols and materials into spaces for contemplation.

Ultimately, Winingham’s mandalas are invitations to slow down and look inward while remaining aware of the larger patterns that surround us. Their interconnected lines, elemental symbols, and cyclical forms suggest that beneath the complexity of the visible world lies an underlying order, one that can be experienced through attention, repetition, and the quiet act of following the thread.