At the heart of my practice is an exploration into the technology of offerings. I do this to create balance, invoke devotion and because I know it can be powerful for personal or ecological repair. I make work by observing in nature, refining my listening, and often drawing with my eyes closted, trusting and responding to somatic perceptions. It’s a dance for me between form, sound and essence, but in the movements of line and imaginations is where I feel the forces of nature communicate, and where I feel pulled to touch on how spirit animates matter.
Out of my images I build a body of research so I can develop an offering to the land using image, sculpture, ritual or live art, a creative act where I can also invite others to observe or participate. Sometimes it’s just me in the woods with the birds.
I’m intent on using art in this way to counter ecological collapse, align with unseen forces and offer up my devotion.
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 art and movement sessions.
I also teach a creative process for observing plants - as a way to encounter the medicine of a plant.
I’m based in the UK.
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 where I witnessed immense beauty, but learnt about an alarming loss in bio-diversity beginning to unfold. There began an expansion leearning precious indigenous teachings from the Mexica to address the healing people needed, for us to take care of the Earth.
I changed careers to study natural medicine systems, and art therapy. For the last 20 years, motivated by 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 the climate changes, we need to adapt our nervous systems as much as we need to generate a healthy environmental system. In order to navigate hard paralysing experiences (global and personal) of loss, betrayal, depression I’ve found being active or in activism needs disciplines of beauty where art, science and nature are in alliance for understanding what’s needed for establishing harmony.
I have been profoundly touched, taught and guided in my work by the Mexica tradition in Mexico, and also the 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. 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 also to depersonalise our success, move away from individuated leadership and into visionary social ethics, for the good of all.
I studied art therapy in 2008-11 at Tobias School of Art & Therapy, an Anthroposophical transpersonal counselling training. A rich study ongoing of art as a science and soul force, a tool for expanding perception and knowing how form carries essence, and brings harmony.
These trainings were the foundation for specialising in botanical observation and healing. 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.