Geraldine Hudson
Affilliation: Goldsmiths UOL
As an interdisciplinary artist and curator, based between Sweden and the Uk. Geraldine was involved in socially engaged art/music and activism for many years before going back to pursue her own practice whilst based in Stockholm.
She co-founded and produces the seminar series Conjuring Creativity and more recently a series of workshops MARE examining the entanglements of Magic/k, Art & Ecology.
Within her own practice she enacts rites, actions and pilgrimages which then feed back into the exhibited work. She chooses to engage in an art making which is often cyclical, mystical and site specific, with an ongoing enquiry into animistic/magical reconciliation as means of other than capitalist belonging. She has exhibited variously throughout Europe, and presented at conferences on contemporary art and magic/k.
Panel: Pilgrimage, Procession, Pageantry
Talk Title: On Common Pilgrimages and Contemporary Folk Lores
This paper will present and expand upon the intentions behind an ongoing body of work which has manifested as a 4 year long observation and dedication to a Lammas Meadow in East London.
Common Pilgrimages seeks to ask - in considering our time of ecological collapse and the severences that led to this - What would our relationship with a body of land, and the other beings living in and on that land, look like if we approached it as an animated sacred space. This talk will outline how the work takes as starting points in equal measure, both the land enclosures from early modernism and the traditions medieval christian pilgrimage, which in turn replaced older venerations.
I'll also borrow directly from Eliade's theory of sacred time/space or hierophany, regarding religion and magic, this occurs when the homogenous is ' left aside, where a sanctified experience is made possible via cyclical return to the same site. By choosing to hold a contemporary rite, aligned with the older agricultural pagan year, specifically on a piece of ancient Lammas land, can this be a type of site specific temporal re-annimation. A Rite of Return.
The constant throughout this work, - which includes observational gatherings and workshops, has been the sourcing and digging of wild clay according to lunar temporalities. The clay offerings made are then given back to the land every year, in an act of contemporary sympathetic magic, a form of cunning magic/k mixed with folk pageant.
By inviting strangers to create art as a site-specific pilgrimage, I aim to foster another relationship to the land, a re-membering and re-connection. In doing this, I propose the authoring of contemporary folk customs as world building devices through which, a re-enchantment can in turn facilitate wider ecological reconciliation.