Photo by Lauren LaRocca In Marilyn Banner’s “Sacred Ground,” she encompasses present-time reality and its resonance in the psyche. Banner’s mountains are both the Blue Ridge Mountains and the archetypal Sacred Center. Her fields are both particular places in Virginia and expanses in which one can move and dream. Her horses are specific horses, tamed and fed, and metaphors for the self, sometimes feeling fenced, always reaching for freedom.

To make sense and to more cohesively understand what Banner is doing, it’s worth investigating the visual art she’s created in the past 30 years.

She began in the ’70s with the question, “Am I an artist?” Which led Banner to travel backwards before forwards, asking more questions, in order to answer the first.

Who am I? How are my memories who I am? ... and how do I live through them? ... and how do I release them? What are my historic roots and my spiritual roots? What are my demons and where do they live and when are they triggered to arise? What are my dreams trying to tell me?

Banner, who now lives in Takoma Park with her husband, began graduate studies at the Massachusetts College of Art after being rejected from Queens College, where she was told to have babies and teach grade school after expressing her interest in mixed media. (She continued making art anyway and, meanwhile, became a grade school teacher before applying to go back to school.)

With the help of her thesis advisor, she built her own course of work and rummaged through her subconscious to create art that reflected her inner workings.

“I didn’t understand the public would be appalled,” she said, laughing, standing next to a life-sized bloody bone sculpture she made for her master’s exhibition.

A few shows and one thesis on art and the subconscious later, she completed the program.

“That’s when I called myself an artist,” she said. “I went to the deepest part of myself, and I was an artist. Then it was unshakable,” she said. “No one could stop me.”

She and her husband — and her life-sized collection of bones and other dark, feminine sculptures — relocated to D.C., where Banner joined the now-defunct group Washington Women’s Art Center.

“It was a, quote, feminist group,” she said. “They weren’t that feminist. I wasn’t coming at art as a feminist though. I was coming at it from this deep place, and what was coming out was feminine.

“I thought art was about risk taking,” she continued. “I had all these bones. I thought, who am I? What am I gonna do?”

She continued to explore her own being, series after series; continued to push the envelope, question the lines people before her had drawn, and exhibit her work in the D.C. region.

Since the early ’80s, she created series connected to Biblical folk tales, mythology and Hebrew text, to name a few, and worked in sculpture, mixed media, printmaking and photo transfers. She created two series of what she calls Soul Ladders — a set of larger-than-life ladder sculptures that rise from the underworld and another, Ladders of Light, that descend from the heavens, once described by a poet as looking like the garments of angels.

After a trip to Costa Rica, Banner started creating nature pieces. Her latest series features encaustic paintings of flowers at Brookeside Gardens, and the previous series, Sacred Ground, which will be shown at the Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center beginning Aug. 15, focuses on Appalachian landscapes, also encaustic.

She discovered the medium, popularized by Jasper Johns, at Virginia Center for the Creative arts, a retreat she attends regularly in Sweetbriar, Va., and fell in love.

“I thought, this is really coming from my body,” she said. Beeswax-based encaustic medium is rubbed onto a hot plate where it’s melted and then painted onto a prepared wooden canvas with a brush. She then uses a hot air gun, or heat gun — which reaches 1,200 degrees — to fuse the surface wax with the layers of wax underneath. Then she draws into the piece with tools and fills them with oily black wax, so that they appear as etchings or thin pen and ink lines.

In her most recent work, her layers and inner influence are subtler, though they haven’t disappeared.

Sacred Ground depicts the Blue Ridge Mountains landscape in loose, abstract encaustic pieces. The ground is made sacred through interpretation and the life given to it by the people who live there, she explained. By internalizing the landscapes and conveying them through her individual lens (what other way?), Banner creates, in effect, sacred space.

She said she used to think of her work as blessings, each piece being a sort of prayer. Whether that be through the process of creating it or the end result, she left ambiguous.

“You know, it’s like my whole life is in here,” she said, standing in the middle of her warehouse studio in Kensington, with various collections of work stored in sections along each wall. “Now I’m looking outward,” she said. “I mapped out my psyche — that was the idea — and I think I finished something.”