Geraldine Hudson
My main concerns as an artist are bound to questions around consensus reality, constructed hierachies in relation to the other than human and emancipatory concerns through an othered female phenomenology.
I enact embodied rites, actions and pilgrimages which then feed back into an exhibited practice. Choosing to engage in an art making which is often cyclical, mystical or site specific, hoping to manifest a conduit for reconciliation and healing. By engaging in folk – lores and magicks I author the work through rejected and analogue modes of making, I view these as stages upon which to deconstruct and reclaim overlooked histories, especially those of the outcast and othered due to harmful systemic frameworks of capitalism and neofeudalism.
During this workshop participants are guided through a meditation journey as they work with wild clay to form a votive offering.
These offerings become part of the ongoing Common Pilgrimage, which is a calendrical folk custom and observation. The wild clay offerings given back to the land as part of a performative harvest rite, which takes place yearly on the Lammas Meadow, Leyton Marshes at the beginning of August.
The offerings, and rite, change and evolve each year according to the materialities, conditions and people involved, being authored by the collective.
This votive making workshop acts as both a holder of embodied space, giving place for recalibration and connection with earth, in itself a healing practice. Whilst allowing for other perceptions to evolve when considering what is sacred.
As a guide in this collective work, I'm interested in how we author our own devotional folk cultures as a means to heal through communing with 'other'. Proposing that customs of coming together in line with the cosmological calendar, are in themselves acts of folk magic and world building. Specifically when placed within a wider context of re-vival of the sacred, and reconciliation with our shared ecologies within a post industrial, late capitalist society.
