I immerse myself in art and ritual experiences rooted in spiritual ecology and animist practise. In the making and in the offering I know this as a way to generate life force, and restore life.
I also teach a creative process for observing plants - as a way to encounter the medicine of a plant, and understand the intelligent design of nature. It’s been a passion of mine, to convey the magic of how drawing reveals animate relationships with a non-human world. Here, new ideas and ways of seeing emerge. Conversations happen.
As well as my artistic practise, my work extends to facilitation, curating immersive creative rituals, offering creative guidance, retreat experiences, healing and one to one therapeutic sessions.
All my work is a genuine investigation into the science of form, colour and frequency, and the importance of combining both observation and imagination. My intentions are to connect art with acts of devotion that can become integral to environmental care and conservation.
I’m based in the UK, and travel around!
A little about me.
Some context…
I was first an art historian, and then worked in global music PR and event and brand management. I was changed by a trip to Mexico in 2004 which opened me up spiritually, where I witnessed immense beauty, but learnt about an alarming loss in bio-diversity beginning to unfold. There was a revival of cultural tradition and an expansion of teachings coming to the surface there to address the healing people needed, for us to take care of the Earth. This was what moved me to do something more in balance with wellbeing and the natural world.
My career was now directed by studying natural medicine systems, and art therapy. For the last 20 years, motivated by the incredible power of spiritual science I have focused on work and my own self development that draws on the necessity of our wellbeing in connection to environmental wellbeing. It has not been easy, more and more as we rely on technology and climate changes, we need to regulate our nervous systems as much as we need to have a healthy environmental system. I have found in order to navigate hard paralysing experiences of loss, betrayal, depression and having to change patterns (personal and global), we need to have disciplines of beauty where art and nature are our science for establishing harmony.
I have been profoundly touched, taught and guided in my work by the Mexica tradition in Mexico, and also Umbanda Afro-Indigenous traditions in Brazil. I entered into an apprenticeship with a traditional Curandera (healer) in 2004, and had the fortune to study over many years the in-depth nature-based philosophies to live well, heal well, learn and maintain balance. Not without experiencing the opposite as well! I feel immensly honoured to be able to use, learn from, and protect the spiritual and cultural knowledge of people and cultures who kept ancestral practices still intact. Technology we all need. Helping to retrieve what is in us all.
I studied art therapy in 2008-11 at Tobias School of Art & Therapy, an Anthroposophical transpersonal counselling training. A rich study of art as a science and soul force, a tool for accessing information and a tool for balancing. It’s an ongoing investigation in how nature, colour, form, story can affect one physically, neurologically and energetically.
These trainings were the foundation for specialising in botanical observation and practise of beauty with plants. I found it to be the most transformative theme , and quickest way to establish coherence when working therapeutically.
Over the years I have taught my own workshops, managed a school of art (The New School of Art) and worked as a therapeutic counsellor or facilitator. Plants have consistently shown me they are the strongest agents of change with the right information, and inspiration. For me, they work at the subtlest levels of soul, and logic, expanding my understanding of how all of nature communicates, responds and is connected.