Hemorrhagic Oracle II, Lloyd Galbraith, 2025, photography, 24 x 36 in. / 60.96 x 91.44 cm.

Ritual Portraits: Lloyd Galbraith’s Oracle Series

December 24, 2025 Gavin Coates

Featured image: Hemorrhagic Oracle II, Lloyd Galbraith, 2025, photography, 24 x 36 in. / 60.96 x 91.44 cm.

Lloyd Galbraith’s Oracle series presents the human face as a sacred site, one that absorbs ritual, transformation, and devotion through acts of physical and symbolic intervention.

Lloyd Galbraith is a multidisciplinary artist blending sculpture and photography to explore ritual, embodiment, and transformation through the human form.

In Hemorrhagic Oracle I, Verdant Oracle II, and Craspedia Oracle III, Galbraith merges sculpture, performance, and photography to construct portraits that feel less like images and more like living rites. Using hand-built structures, floral materials, and water, these works confront the viewer with a body that is simultaneously wounded, adorned, submerged, and sanctified.

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Hemorrhagic Oracle I, Lloyd Galbraith, 2025, photography, 24 x 24 in. / 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

In Hemorrhagic Oracle I, a vivid red sculptural form envelops the face, operating as both mask and wound. The material presence of the tendrils, thick, visceral, and almost anatomical, suggests rupture while also functioning as a ceremonial adornment. Galbraith’s use of red evokes blood, sacrifice, and rebirth, positioning the subject as a vessel rather than an individual. The face is partially obscured, challenging the tradition of portraiture as identity-revelation and instead framing it as transformation-through-devotion. The work’s intensity lies in its refusal to separate beauty from violence; here, embodiment is earned through exposure and surrender.

Verdant Oracle II, Lloyd Galbraith, 2025, photography, 24 x 36 in. / 60.96 x 91.44 cm.

Verdant Oracle II shifts the emotional register from rupture to immersion. Submerged beneath water and surrounded by green dianthus and amaranthus, the figure appears suspended in a moment of ritual cleansing. The lush vegetation functions as both offering and veil, blurring the boundary between body and environment. Water distorts the face, softening contours and dissolving certainty, while the plants signal regeneration and continuity. This work reads as an act of worship through nature, where distortion is not destructive but restorative, and devotion becomes a quiet, cyclical process rather than a singular event.

Craspedia Oracle III, Lloyd Galbraith, 2025, photography, 24 x 18 in. / 60.96 x 45.72 cm.

In Craspedia Oracle III, Galbraith intensifies the tension between the sacred and the artificial. The subject’s face is fragmented by water’s optical effects, surrounded by the bright, spherical forms of craspedia flowers. The composition feels both ceremonial and synthetic, as if ritual has been translated through contemporary spectacle. Reflection and illusion dominate the image, transforming the gaze into something unstable and mediated. The work’s presentation in a public, architectural context underscores this duality, devotion becomes performative, yet still deeply intimate.

Together, these three works form a cohesive meditation on the body as a site of ritual, vulnerability, and renewal. Galbraith’s Oracle series dissolves the boundary between portrait, altar, and performance, replacing static identity with cyclical transformation. Through blood-red structures, verdant immersion, and reflective distortion, the artist proposes devotion not as belief, but as embodied experience, where flesh, flora, and water converge in acts of becoming.

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