Episode 6: Vision, Ritual and Legacy

In this episode of the Therapeutic Landscapes podcast, Rebecca Burns speaks with artist and curator Dr Su Fahy, whose work moves through ritual, vision, dream, archives, legacy artists, feminist art histories, and the relationship between historical and contemporary creative practice.

The conversation centres on Su’s current project, The String of Pearls, an unfolding curatorial project that seeks to reprise the reputation of women artists who have been written out of the art historical canon. Working in association with Feminist Archive South and University of Bristol Special Collections, the project traces the work, letters, paintings, rituals, manifestos, friendships, and creative networks surrounding Monica Sjöö and the radical women artists connected to her world.

What emerges is a powerful story of women making work, making space, and making culture under difficult conditions. In the 1970s, these artists were writing to galleries, organising their own exhibitions, creating posters, travelling work between cities, forming creative networks, visiting sacred sites, making visionary paintings, and finding ways to show one another when formal institutions refused to take them seriously.

Su speaks about the importance of returning to the paintings themselves, and to the depth of thinking, writing, symbolism, politics, and spiritual research behind them. Too often, women artists working with goddess culture, ritual, dreams, symbolism, pilgrimage, and sacred landscapes have been dismissed, sensationalised, or reduced to an anecdote. The String of Pearls asks us to look again, with more care, more seriousness, and more generosity.

A central thread in the conversation is Jill Smith’s Spiral Ritual, which Su has helped bring into contemporary exhibition and gathering spaces. The ritual, originally connected to Jill Smith’s practice as a ritual artist, has been reactivated through instruction, action, adaptation, and collective participation. Su reflects on the quietness, reverence, and inward attention that can emerge when people walk the spiral together, and how ritual can create a different kind of space within an exhibition or conference.

The episode also explores archives as living places rather than static repositories. Letters, posters, manifestos, photographs, instructions, paintings, and memories become part of an active process of repair, recognition, and return. Su is clear that this work is not about extracting from legacy artists in order to build curatorial reputation. It is about enabling artists to be written back into history on their own terms.

At its heart, this is a conversation about care.

Care for artists.

Care for archives.

Care for paintings.

Care for memory.

Care for the women whose work has endured, even when the structures around them failed to honour it.

It is also a conversation about creative courage, DIY culture, and the importance of asking what kind of ancestors we are becoming.

Through The String of Pearls, Su invites us to see legacy as something alive, relational, and still unfolding. These women artists are not simply figures from the past. Their work continues to speak into contemporary practice, especially for artists, researchers, curators, and communities interested in ritual, landscape, dream, symbolism, feminism, and collective forms of making.

This episode is about writing women back in, as more than a footnote, as a living, luminous thread through art history, ritual practice, and therapeutic landscapes.

Bio:

Dr. Su Fahy's work focuses on ritual, vision & dream within legacy artists work in archives and linking their work to contemporary artists through text and image documents and lens-based media.

Links:

Monica Sjöö Curatorial: www.monicasjoocuratorial.com

Instagram Projects: @monica_sjoo

Instagram: @memoryartpalace

Therapeutic Landscapes: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org