Workshop: A Spell to Cleave

✨A Spell to Cleave

The clay body holds the story of the land, of all bodies who have been in contact with that piece of land, biologically and psychically – the clay being an archive of death, decay, transformation and reincarnation.

As part of her current durational body of work, Earth Bound Bodies – Cleft, which excavates, reclaims and re-enchants. Hudson takes the English Witch Trials and land enclosures as the collective trig point. Cleft is an ongoing magical working, to re-pair the severance. Composed of various embodied spells, working with site specific clay dug from the areas where women were executed as witches in England.

By being intentionally Earth Bound the othered body undergoes essential psychic transformation allowing space for attuned communal healing and ecological stewardship with the cosmological whole.

For this part, 12 participants are invited to join the artist for a session of embodied meditation and earth magick. You'll be guided by Hudson in an act of collective art, making raw intuitive clay forms, which together form a transitory altar piece in honour of the othered women tried as witches.

.. from their body, to the body of land ... from my body to your body.

A spell to cleave is a recognition and dedication to the body’s who were tried and persecuted during the witch trials in England. A clarion call to revisit and readdress the wound and allow for the transformation it brings.

A spell of re-cognition

A spell of re-claimation

A spell to cleave ..

Please wear comfortable and warm clothing considering the time of the year and bring with you some water to keep hydrated. A willingness to participate in a meditation journey and feeling comfortable with handling wild clay * is essential for this piece.

🌟this clay was dug from the small woodland path in Essex joining the villages of Mistley where the infamous Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins lived, with Manningtree where 4 of the accused women were executed.

🧙‍♀️Geraldine is an interdisciplinary fine artist who holds a B.A in ceramics, an M.A in fine art printmaking and is currently studying part time towards the MFA fine art at Goldsmiths UAL.

As a curator she is co-founder and programmer of Conjuring Creativity, a conference concerned with the relationship between contemporary art and esoteric practice. Alongside the nomadic art school M.AR.E

She is also an initiated Ceremonial Magician, Druid and practicing Witch working with the wheel of the year and magick as means to reconcile and attune with the other than human and our shared ecologies.