Episode 14: The Parish of Milk
In this episode of the Therapeutic Landscapes podcast, Rebecca Burns speaks with Katie GoddenGreen, an artist whose practice explores storytelling, rural memory and seasonal rhythms through clay, woodcut, textiles and material-led making.
The conversation centres on The Parish of Milk, Katie’s small imagined and non-imagined Cornish domain where beasts, plants, feasts, women, stories, fields, farming histories, folklore and seasonal rituals are gathered together through art. It is both real and not-real: a hidden valley, a magical world, a place of milk, memory, joy, making and belonging.
Katie describes milk as something deeply connected to farming, maternity, animals, nourishment and the beginning of life. In this way, The Parish of Milk becomes a way of holding the land, the women, the animals, the old rural knowledge, and the everyday magic of a Cornish community that is changing, but not yet lost.
Katie also discusses Sew Sew, the weekly sewing group that began around Katie’s kitchen table and has grown into a living community of women making together. Through linen, patchwork, Victorian pockets, rosettes, bunting, bells, dried grasses, sailors’ sweetheart pin cushions and frolicsome frocks, the group has become a place of friendship, confidence, creativity and local connection.
Through the episode comes Katie’s desire to keep rural memory alive. She speaks about Cornish farming, field names, cows’ names, old sayings, seasonal change, trees, leaves, birds, plants and the small pieces of knowledge that root people in place. These details carry belonging and remind us that knowing the name of a field, a tree, a flower, a cow, or a seasonal sign can change the way we feel about the world around us.
The episode also explores the magic and myth of making. Katie speaks about her ceramic babushkas, dedushkas, and Baba Yaga figures as beings that seem to arrive through the process of clay. They are made by hand, but they also appear to make themselves, gathering stories, songs, sayings, ancestral echoes and more-than-human presences as they come into form.
There is joy here too: dresses that come alive, hats that transform the wearer, the fool as someone wise enough to tell the truth, and the possibility of taking The Parish of Milk out into the world through agricultural shows, carnivals, milk churns, wheelbarrows, frocks, bells and maybe, one day, a milk float.
This is a conversation about rural creativity as a form of belonging.
How gathering around fabric can become community.
How clay can become a guardian.
How old sayings can carry future wisdom.
How seasonal making can reconnect people with land.
How myth can help keep history alive.
How every place might secretly have its own Parish of Milk.
This episode is about women making together, rural knowledge, Cornish memory, the more-than-human landscape, and the power of art to help a community remember itself while imagining what it might become.
Bio
Katie is an artist with a commitment to making. Her practice is rooted in the Cornish landscape that she refers to as The Parish of Milk—an imagined and non imagined rural domain. The Parish holds almanacs, rituals, and the “left-behind” wonder of past times. Through storytelling, she gathers and reworks seasonal narratives, stitching them onto vintage linen smocks, shaping them into pottery sculptures, carving them into woodcut prints. These slow, material-led processes treat craft as both method and meaning. With 20 years as a secondary school Art teacher, Katie is looking to further her career post MA in higher education
Links
Find out more about Katie’s work:
Website: katiegoddengreen.com
Instagram: @katiegoddengreen