flittermice and hoots

i am leading 2 artist walks for Aune Head Arts this September with artist, Emily Swann. We have devised the walks to encourage creative engagement with wildlife and landscape and both will include collecting found sounds for a sound collage for Soundart Radio. the first walk will be a cliff top walk at the stunning Prawle point and the second a sensory walk at Andrews Wood nature reserve, both in south Devon. For more information check out the Aune Head Arts website. Both Events are free but you will need to book a place on the AHA website as numbers are limited. come with us and delve into your imagination at these two very special sites!




http://www.auneheadarts.org.uk/site/projects/flittermice/index.html

http://www.thelittleoakfolk.co.uk/emily-swann

http://www.soundartradio.org.uk/

eagle's dream

Still a few places left on our vision quest for young people this summer, get in touch for more info x

Cave Writings

follows are writings and sound recordings from inside the white springs at Glastonbury tor. the springs are a cold, wet and dark place overwhelmed with the sound of the spring as it pours out of the earth there. a din of rushing water, small streams running underfoot and down the walls as i feel my way in the dark. i spent two hours writing in complete darkness there.

pistyll Rhaeadr

to the waterfall in caress of darkness we creep. to meet. to introduce. to offer up. to listen.become. think of every waterfall i have ever stood beneath. feel the rush of the river on its way down. the constant rock. the ever changing water and in her silver in the moonlight shimmer smooth treasures wait to take us to the dreamworld and help us stay awake. what shall we dream tonight you and i? let us hold hands and dive in. x


back from the mountains. back to the gentle valleys. the slow steady river. still landing..

i have just returned from a vision quest in the welsh mountains under the island's tallest waterfall; pistyll rhaeadr. a land still alive with the stories of its making. not a faint whisper but a roaring wind. the sound of water crashing down and as i drift into sleep the wind and the water and the wind indistinguishable. by day two my tent a crumpled mess flapping about on the valley floor, my defences along with it.

writing starts.. suddenly from nothing~something is happening even if it doesn't mean anything. its cold here, right through to the bones. thoughts come and go and the time goes by; i remain.i am heavy and slow moving. autumn is here and the wasps are clutching to the dregs of summer the way i do. that delightful September melancholy looming. the red berries of the rowan are here already , got me thinking about the last time we saw them;collected bagfulls of them and left them in the freezer to never become jelly. it was a good day though, golden sun on the reservoir banks, red berries all the way around. how many more days are there like that hiding away dusty corner until a memory glistens and you rummage through the box to get it out again?

a blind white horse
twin sycamore seeds
a buzzard dive between two trees
waterdroplets on the nettles in the moonlight
the long night
an hour of sun in the morning
wet prayer bundles in the wind
a lone black feather in long grass
the light of a fire not too far away
crow shouting in the morning "come out come, out and see the dawn"
a girl whispering her secrets into a huge moss covered rock
the flower tops on the thistles that were not there yesterday
a spider's web started over.

a prayer on the wind
to go more softly
to not waste the minutes
to sew up old tears
a prayer for compassion
for dreams
for friends...

once there were circles all over this land. now only traces.. and fading. but we remember for we were there. and we walk these circles still.

i feel my edges. my circumferences. a glowing trace. a stillness. a stone in my hand. a fire inside. i feel your force, the cold of your water. the white of your falling. the rocks you are made of and the height you can see from. i feel our meeting this night. i at your feet. your constant flow. we both witnessing the other. we fit so perfectly here in this moment together. i feel the light fall down from the heavens, filling me up. the light like fires in my palms, the smoke; incense on the breeze. i see how it feels to be you. a constant flow, giving. i have been here a thousand years and others before me.

becoming automatic

I will spend 12 hours blindfolded inside a white canvas box. I will write automatically and as continuously as I can for the duration. The box will be filmed from above and the live feed projected back onto two sides of the box. The space will be lit inside so that from outside all that can be seen is the silhouette of the writer and the writing inverted on the canvas.



This work is born out of my research of writing from `altered states of consciousness and my experiences of my relationship as a writer with the liminal (threshold). I wish to further explore some of the ideas that came out of my written research project; specifically the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his notion of becoming, in this case writing as a process of becoming.


This performance is both an experiment and a drawing together of my writing practice and my shamanic practice. It draws on my previous work in Mexico where I explored the liminal as a context for writing and from my work with “the dark” as a tool of initiation.

Darkness and the (un)seen are themes that reoccur in my work as well as the boundaries between sleeping and waking and the writing that emerges from these states. In Shamanic tradition darkness forms a part of many initiation ceremonies both as a fear to be overcome and as a form of sensory deprivation to induce hallucinations and promote non-visual “seeing”, or perception of the “non-ordinary”. This has been a focus in my shamanic practice and the last couple of years have seen me taking part in a burial ceremony, cave meditation and a three-day blindfolded vision quest. This piece is a culmination of this work as well as an ongoing practice of writing in dark spaces.



This practice has brought up questions for me around authorship and “voice(s)” and in my final performance at Dartington I hope to embrace both “The Death of the author” and in Deleuzian terms all the voices of “the pack”.

“The pack is a mobile multiplicity, spreading through contagion and bounded by anomaly.”
-Deleuze and Guattari “A thousand plateaus”

I have also been looking at the automatic writings of Susan Hiller, particularly her work “sisters of Menon” and find a strong resonance in my work with her statement; “Identity is always a collaboration. The self is multiple, I am a location; a focus.”



This work also explores the relationship between ritual and performance and the role of the writer as shaman or “mediator” or again, in Deluzian terms; the “anomalous”. Underlying this is of course a questioning of the role of the audience/reader and In my presentation of this very vulnerable and open process in such a performative space I hope to engage the audience in a dialogue of these roles.




Following my performance I will open the box and invite the audience to come inside and view the outcomes (or at least a snapshot) of this process and continue this dialogue. I will be in the box until 15.00 to talk with anyone who is interested about my/their/our experiences of the piece.







This is a video made from film footage of the performance, (i left a camera in the space with an invitation to film) time lapse footage of the canvases and an interview immediately following the performance. - with thanks to Mae Karthauser for the interview and for staying up all night with me! thanks also to Jonathan Street for help with lighting/technology, and other night owls who stayed up for the duration of the performance!

welcome

welcome to the blog of my contextual enquiry project.

here you will find a collection of writings and reflections on my journey to Mexico to learn about the Dreamtime of the Mayans and my adventures in Hollywood's weird and wonderful dreamscape.

please feel free to read in which ever way you will but the more linear of you may wish to read chronologically and start with my first post and introduction to the project way back in October. you can navigate through the posts by date using the menu on the right.

i would also like to draw your attention to the list of links just above this where you can find a link to the blog i set up as a collaborative project between myself and the other participants on the conscious dreamers course as well as a link to the 12 conscious dreamers website where an outline of the course i took part in can be found.

anna

always somewhere between a sunrise and a sunset; a constant becoming, no fixed locus my focus shifts as i reassemble my assemblage point in every instant.

you have taught me to be hollow, filled me up with the cynical notion that all i am is all i have seen, all i write a regurgitation of all i have been fed. and as down to the depths as this has taken me, the space i now find inside is luminous. i am dispersed on threads that fill the sky and i am here in the tips of my fingers as i type.

mememachine

http://www.realitysandwich.com/multiple_choice_reality




"regardless of how secular this ultramodern condition appears. the velocity and mutability of the times invokes a certain supernatural quality that must be seen, at least in part, through the lenses of religious thought and the fantastic storehouse of the imagination"

Erik Davis "techgnosis".

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."

William Gibson, "Neuromancer".


"recite to yourself some of the traditional attributes of the word spiritual; mythic, magical, ethereal, incorporeal, intangible, nonmaterial, disembodied.. is that not a definition of the electronic-digital?"

Timothy Leary "chaos and cyberculture".

"I leave my home seduced by the horizon of the distant, but my body accelerates into obsolescence. I have no place - or - that place is everywhere. This absence of place has created binary encoded spaces of death. Not frozen, but seamlessly enfolded. An erosion of trajectories, like an ancient wound. Yet I feel no pain. I draw a thousand lines across the void."

John Beckman "merge invisible layers" http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=112


"When the simulation wins a new kind of autonomy, the territory disappears behind the map: "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory,precession of simulacra,it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. it is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself."

Jean Baudrillard "Simulacra and Simulations".

reflection and refraction

when i started out on this journey i had two areas of inquiry that i wanted to explore; the liminal state as context for writing and the digital as a context for shamanic experience. over the last few months i have gone full circle in my understanding of these two contexts and how they relate to each other.

my first assumption about the liminal state was that you could clearly distinguish some kind of line between shamanic reality and material reality. what i came to realize was that these realities were always intertwined and overlayed. The idea of dividing consciousness into "ordinary" and "non-ordinary" states relies on the assumption that "ordinary" states of consciousness are indeed ordinary, i.e that objective reality is objective and not just the current dominant paradigm.

"The straight world didn't end. The straight world and the other world had bled into one another and produced the world that we live in today."

William Gibson, "no maps for these territories".


the further my explorations have taken me into shamanism the further i have understood how so called "altered" states of consciousness have no more or less validity as any other state of consciousness. No one reality is really any more "real" than any other, its all about what we can agree on, what we feel most comfortable with, what we can imagine, what the media tells us..

"all hallucinations are real, some hallucinations are more real than others."

Genesis P Orridge, from "go" ultraculture journal one.


it seems that increasingly culture is reflecting this model of reality. digital media is becoming increasingly more immediate and non linear and this has huge impacts on the ways we process information and therefore the ways in which we contribute to that process as artists.

this project has really brought up far more questions around these ideas for me than it has answers, it has fundamentally changed relationship with my creative practice. i really feel like i am starting everything a new.

dream machine

in every fruit is the seed of it's own destruction.




before i left i felt the city infringing on my thoughts, i wanted to shut it out. now it just seeps through me and i don't mind because its no more real than i am. we smile at each other across the ether, "i know your game" we whisper as we pass in the street.









i return from the stillness of the desert to Hollywood's bright lights, Christmas has sprinkled the city with fake snow and the smell of cinnamon. the sun still shines its Californian glow but after the relentless desert heat i am shivering in the slightest shade. sounds are loud and conversations caricatures from my skeleton eye sockets. i am invisible and slip along the sidewalk freely. all wires exposed i see the innerworkings of this program. the dream machine churning and perpetuating.

escape luminosity

letting go the wheel

follows is a collection of my writings and drawings from my peyote ceremony, on eof the last ceremonies of the course. i had a lot of anxiety about what this experience would be like. although i had experienced hallucinogenic plants before, i had never experienced them within the context of ceremony or so far from home. i suddenly was very aware of just how much resistance i had to this structure. i could'nt relax with the idea of being bound to a structure in an otherwise structureless realm.

it seems this feeling was echoed throughout the group because a series of events unfolded the day before the ceremony that meant we could not continue as planned. Daniel and Arbolita's son was very sick which meant if we did it that night only one of them would be able to lead the group. also only about half the group returned from the days exercise -to pick our peyote- with any cacti and i returned hours after dark after getting hopelessly lost in some much spikier cacti.

(There is something very central to this project about getting lost and i am interested in how this came up for me in response to ritual. the juxtaposition between walking without direction and trying desperately to find one's bearings is a strange relationship that repeated itself in many guises during the course, physically, in journeying and in my writing and as i saw more and more parallels between them, these things became more and more indistinguishable.)

so, because of these factors, we postponed the ceremony until the following day. instead of taking the peyote around the fire in the evening and staying in ceremony all night, we meditated together in the morning, eat the peyote together under a tree near the camp and walk off into the desert alone. we then had the option if we wanted to return to the camp for sunset to hold ceremony around the fire, which actually the whole group did. this felt like a good marriage of chaos and order and definitely had huge impacted on all of our experience.




i spent a long period of time playing with dualities that day and in fact this was mirrored throughout the whole trip. the mayan's symbol for the centre of the universe; the hunab ku, came to me again and again in different forms, working as a sigil holding paradox within me.







this is something i drew whilst peyote was with me. i was trying to show the energies of different numbers as i experienced them and the colliding worlds of day/night inner/outer. the view i drew of the sunset was as i had seen it vertical hanging from the branches of a tree, the night engulfing my left side and sinking sun my right.

bury me with the stars

at the end of the second week we each conducted our own earth burial ceremony, this was definitely a gateway point, the energy intensified ten fold for me that day. this ceremony was probably the one thing i had the most fear around before going to mexico, and suitably ended up being my favorite day in the desert. earth burial is a traditional form of initiation in many shamanic traditions, it is a ceremony of death and transformation, renewal and rebirth.




our task was to dig our own grave using a pick axe and once inside tell our life story to the earth. i don't think i have ever felt so content as the hours i spent in that hole in the ground as i chatted my way through a thousand flooding memories laughing uncontrollably almost all day! the earth was cool even in the heat of the desert sun and the weight of it on top of me gave the most incredible sensation of being held; completely, there was nothing within me that couldn't just trickle away into the soil and be soaked up by the earth mother. you could tell her anything; she's heard it all before!



emerging from the grave i was completely white, caked in the baked earth. i wanted to stay like that forever. i couldn't see myself but i imagined the saddhus from india covered in ash from the fires of the dead, i imagined that was me. my body felt light, like i was made of it and my heart felt like it might burn right out of me. i remember thinking, then, and every morning since. "ok im dead, what do i want to do today?"

crystal skull meditation

i am following our instruction. focusing the breath. breathing from the heart, breathing from the third eye, breathing from the top of my head. i am reaching out towards the stars, to the star where i was born. i am feeling her light shine down on me. it is filling me up. i am building a pyramid in my head and i am sitting inside. it points to the sky. below my feet another, it points to the centre of the earth. here i sit, breathing in, breathing out.

crystal skull comes. his laughter is echoing right through me. "whats so funny?" more laughing. in front of me he is bobbing up and down. huge bobbing white skull wearing big black sunglasses. like something you might find on the front of a motorbike belonging to a hell's angel. "you look ridiculous" i say. "its your dream" comes the reply through laughter.

i ask you to come into my head. there is much clunking like old machinary, you move our head from side to side. "its a bit like trying to move a dinosaur" you say, pulling my strings; opening my eyes.



my mind is chattering. "listen to you go on and on!" you chuckle. "don't you ever stop? "some things don't need to be understood, its not the only way in you know! you don't need to know the way forward to take a step! even if your mind doesn't understand the importance of the step, it is still taken. and that* holds weight".

empty like an atom

on our first day in the desert we set up a medicine wheel where we stayed alone and meditated, drew, danced sang and slept. the medicine wheel is a tool found in many shamanic cultures although its form varies. the medicine wheel is a way of holding sacred space. it is used for protection and orientation of the dreaming and physical bodies. a basic medicine wheel has 7 directions. north, south, east, west, above, below and within. for the purpose of this exercise we were orientating ourselves with the first four. in the mayan tradition north is the direction of initiation, of air and of consciousness. the east is the direction of fire and the will. the south is the direction of earth and the body and of manifestation. the west is the direction of water, of emotion and of death and transformation. calling a medicine wheel involves honoring each direction and asking for guidance and giving thanks. it is my practice to call a wheel before doing any kind of journeying or magical work. the following piece of writing is taken from my journal of experiences of sitting in circle that day. although alot of my writings that day were of a more personal nature and have not been included, i've kept this one because i feel it demonstrates something i learned in a very practical way that day. if we can centre ourselves in the four directions, learn to watch as our thoughts, desires, emotions swirl around us, we can learn to hold circle in everyday situations; we can see influences come like waves.




i fall asleep to the laughter of coyotes, imagining them as they dance around the tent in the moonlight. i awaken in a dream. the night is quiet and moon fully risen shining silver on my skin. curious i unzip my flimsy cocoon and crawl out into the night. not far away, under the tree that lends us shade from the sun, stalk 6 cat-like creatures. similar to how i'd imagine an ocelot to look, alhough i've never seen one, but their eyes huge and hypnotic; the colour of pale jade. as i fall into them, i fall in love, into the whole universe within. it is like nothing i have ever felt before and somekind of channel is opened. the cat speaks, not words but directly into my head.

a brightness inside

chasing the tail

.. back to the source. we follow the river's bed back to where you sleep/walk deeper into the forest (we go) clutching bright petaled offerings and singing inside. i am full of your fire quetz coatl, running through your cliff-top meadows a-flame shouting at the skies.

day of the dead

teotihuacan; the raw and the cut.

i feel those piled up stones from all the way over here. we are camped outside the gates of the city but they whisper in my dreams all the same, catching the corner of my soul even with my eyes closed. i am avoiding your gaze but feel you all the same, pulling in the stars.

i watch the sun set over the contours of the mountains tracing the black lines of the horizon with the same fasination as the arched back of a lover and i wonder about the builders of these right angled wonders amongst such majesty. the builders of pyramids were not women i wager.




but all the same, i am in awe and i am standing at your heights looking out over the land and i am moving.. with something.feels like ive dreamed here before, seen your coloured flags blowing in the breeze and stared at the reflections of the stars in your pools. i have walked amongst these giants before but never stood here and i get a strange and indescribable sense that im am putting something straight; settling a score somehow.

down into the caves of your birth we go. into the holes of your making, crawling through the belly of the mother. alone in the black and the silence i am breathing fast and suspended from animation at the depth i am out of. heavy rock; crushing me into crystal formation. i am held. i am dry in my mouth and stone inside reaching all the way back to some distant dream of a star. then you dig me up, build me tall and stand on me to reach those stars. but we are all made of stars she whisper.

-}::amatlan::{-

these are pictures and journal entries from Amatlan, the birth place of the mayan god; quetzalcoatl. (about three hours south of mexico city) we stayed in a tipi village here high up in the mountains, the place was full of butterflies and hummingbirds and the whole time we were there i was struck by the unshakable feeling that i had been there before.