Bewilderings wip

Bewilderings is an off shoot that’s emerging from my ongoing body of work A Field Guide to Divine Foraging & where divine foraging is about green lightness & healing, plants, folklore & colour alchemy, Bewilderings is rooted in the dark; the underbelly of mother earth. It's about the divine feminine, chthonic energy, earth pigments, relics & loamy molehills…

The etymological root of bewilder is Old English & means to be led astray into the wild. For me bewilderings mean being led astray by my wild self - addressing that longing many of us are feeling to be grounded, make contact with the earth physically & metaphysically & ultimately rescue mystery from the clutches of rational modernity. Carl Jung had a theory that by removing ourselves for short periods humans

could access something he called archaic consciousness – a primordial instinct or intuitiveness that, if connected to, can expose us to alternative energies & help us assimilate more closely with other species. He also liked the idea of a chthonic energy - a belief stemming from Greek mythology where fertility & death spirits inhabited the underworld realm. The word chthonic derives from the ancient Greek word for soil – so the concept of a soil energy makes contemporary sense; as scientists & environmentalists now recognise the ecological significance of healthy soil - as a complex vital cyclical system – for most terrestrial life.

In the field behind my house molehills erupt in acts of defiant rebellion despite the landowners’ best efforts to eradicate them. Drawn to these loamy pill-ohs I noticed the contrast in colour between each moldewarp (Old English for earth thrower) ranging from iron ore reds to deep yellow ochres & further along shards of limestone washed clean by the rain protrude out of the soil like sharp white teeth. I began collecting & passing on these molestones as chthonic talismans. Back in the field, the closer to human settlements the molehills are the more likely the offerings will manifest as relics – shards of pottery, terracotta pots & clay pipes from the past appear overnight as if been thinking what to do with this cross-species collaboration: Bewilderings that fill my pockets are transferred to glass jars piling up on a shelf in the studio. Last week I processed some wild clay from a mound in Arnside & yesterday I formed a palm- size molebowl made to hold radicle/radical intentions or maybe more sacred gifts from the underworld.

Other bewilderings outcomes so far have been clay/limestone prints & drawings, whispered

invocations & my version of a Daoist exercise called standing like a tree: by rooting down & reaching

up I sometimes feel a rippling energy in my hands - this is unexplained but research into the practice

known as grounding or earthing suggests I could be experiencing natural telluric electrical currents that flow on & under the earth’s surface.