Performance and installation

A grief ritual to societies lost connection to the divine mother

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 The Great Mother filtrates through our human and non-human connections, transcending cultures and gender. This archetype has through a build up of ideological expectations become a somewhat ‘lost experience’ and the need for tuning into her transformative essence has become essential in today’s societal currents. The Mother - The afterbirth is an inner act, born through both women and men connecting to the personal and transpersonal grief of this experience. Transforming this grief as a collective body enables us to enter a place of deep care and intimate listening. It is this deep listening which connects us to her essence, her whispers which remains in the undercurrents of our collective subcouncious. 

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To birth a creative work, is to birth a collective substance, a materialisation of an inner world, it is the alchemy of the invisible substance transformed by the hand into visible substance. Laboured over and cared for, through traces of material, dust, bowls of wax, fire, ash, clay, held by a community, sung to, moved around. Immersed in a village scale. To birth a creative work is inherently a social practice and what is left in material form is all but a fragment of the processes that came before. 

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The object of the Mother used in this performance came into manifestation through a silent material ceremony that took place between 15 women from Xenia,  a group

of migrant and english speaking women that we worked with in 2017 through a commission with SPACE. The silent gathering began around a black piece of felt, we had a fire that melted wax and fragments of materials that the women had symbolic connection with. The women slowly began creating a constellation and a moving mantra of stones, butter, garlic, shells and rope, whilst chanting in their indigenous languages, words of deep remembrance. Through this improvised shared ritual, the Mother was formed. After several hours of process and shared labours we gathered around her, moved,  in hands and some in tears. One woman spoke that the process was like a funeral and a birth, it was necessary to bury our conceptions of motherhood in order to birth new life into the idea of the divine, limitless, transformative power of the archetypal mother. 

 

 

 

“She was born in a cave, she returned to the cave where she was born” - shared mantra created between women”, BearMotherHouse 2017

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