H e l l e b o r e s ⚔️

These only flower in midwinter, and some of them have green or black flowers.

In other news I’ve just found out they are in the same family as buttercups, which I have a weird relationship with as they’re highly effective boggy soil invaders around here, but I’ve come to respect them for their strategy (which includes having extremely charming flowers). The botanical family name is from ‘little frog’ in Latin.

Afterburn: a junk monument, and a floral revival in a post-bushfire landscape

— a few photographic mementos from my recent travels up north. I’m thinking about the big overland movements that we do in partnership with machines, the anatomy of destruction, and the vital forms of native flora in different parts of the country.

A poem:

Another name for the old gods is the elements.

Knowing the long play of data is required work: 

matter is matter, continuing to be measured

in the mythical river of the moon.

//NS


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One of my favourite things: being surprised by the world and delighted by its strange inclusions.

Lots of things in nature have a fairly bloodthirsty design, and the way animals are made is one of them, but there is a delightful cheeriness and simplicity in there too. Like half of a little blue eggshell standing on the grass like a mushroom. I’ve never seen that before.

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I made my first animation! — GIF version of cover art I designed for my crew Ungus Ungus Ungus’ new album release, Constellations. Bonus: my vocals/lyrics appear on tracks 2 and 5.

Listen here: https://ungusungusungus.bandcamp.com/

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Coming soon: an in-person workshop (Melb)

For now, a poem:

Art is forever making itself, piercing the fabric of the world

like an embroidery needle and looping back up,

threads of life following. 

Let these lines - permutations of vibrating matter

- be gold boughs laden with darkly beaded pomegranates.

—NS

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The green ones have come from the other world, tipsy like the breeze up to some foolishness…

—Rumi

As I was assembling this seasonal altar in the forest yesterday, I had a strong flash of body memory from when I was a kid. I had a book about a little girl who made furniture for faeries… I don’t really remember what the story was, but I remember the bodied feeling of enchantment specific to that story. Now there’s a whole new story to be stitched together from the gossamer threads of this breezy forest interlude. In the mix is a seam linking old Irish faerie lore and Rumi’s mention of ‘the other world’.

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“Play isn’t doing what we want, but doing what we can with the materials we find along the way.”

// Bogost, 2016 in Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

Photo taken by a friend at pre-2020 house party; glamour conjured in collabs with the hosts’ dress-up closet

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“Inhabited space transcends geometric space” //Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 1958.

The virtual space, while geometrically awkward for the body, is inhabited.

These are some of my self-reflective notebook pages from Creative Resilience, an online studio I’ve been co-facilitating in recent months in partnership with McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery >>

Triad

Triad

Seed (Fire)

Seed (Fire)

A spell for the sensuous*

*A nod to The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram (1996). Good shit.

Speaking of good shit, this one’s a quick drop for the soil-lovers, the seed grinders, and those turned on by a fertile planet.

When was the last time you lay down outside, belly to the earth? Give it a go; inconvenience yourself if need be.

Fuck any and all norms that say grown humans should not lie on the ground outside, hip bones to the dirt, physically sensing the strength of gravity holding our bodies in a life-death embrace with this planet, its pulse circling through our soft animal hearts.

From inside this embrace, we are impossibly tiny yet perfectly formed. We are also giants, sky-high shadowers of beings that are smaller still: a ladybug on a clover leaf, the colouring of a rock, a miniature forest of ground cover, the multi-organismic creature that is living soil.

This vantage point is powerful in generating a sense of immediacy. For whatever reason, it allows us to temporarily override the forces of language. Perhaps the action of lying belly-down triggers deep, formless rememberings of infancy, of the time before we had language to process our sensing.

Or maybe it lights up the most ancient structures of our brains, remnants of our reptile ancestry that have stayed on for the ride. In a very real way, elements of these ancestors are built into us even as we speed into our next iteration. In the same fashion, our primeval ancestors carried stamps of a time when our being was materially undifferentiated from the earth, even from the very fabric of space - a time when the synthesis of elements making up organic life was a seed yet to germinate.

Or it could be simply that lying belly-down outdoors is, for many of us, an unusual thing to do, thereby opening up novel sensory landscapes and a fresh perceptual lens. 

Enough talk. Why not give it a whirl? Try doing it for at least 5 minutes each day for a week, and see what happens. 

Winter solstice + moon time = 13-point constellation of the pelvic bowl and its generative candlelight.

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Original artwork by NS

“The potentials of art to serve as an embodiment of significant experience, a symbol of transformation, a process of making special, a vehicle for gaining a sense of mastery, and/or an object of personal significance and import are all diminished when the art product is treated solely as a piece of evidence to be examined.”

Catherine Moon, ‘Studio Art Therapy: Cultivating the artist identity in the art therapist’, p. 245

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Riffing on my current travels towards becoming a therapist, and identifying ways to strengthen and refine my identity as artist and alchemist in the process.

Stakeholder mapping can be a form of spellcasting… right?

Poem

I need these words to take flight and land.

Please, leave a gap in the canopy for the waves

that spin me through the rock of material time,

that let me be where I am not /what 

I am not. Let lines and sounds - manipulations

of light and vibration - be limbs and leaves

that touch-reach-invite returning to the roots.

Waste nothing; transmute the fallen parts.

Hear my conviction that I am another you.

—NS

To approach the other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity.

- Emmanuel Levinas in Totality and Infinity p. 51

Anestrus: the period of sexual dormancy between two periods of sexual activity in cyclically breeding mammals. Original design by NS.

I have been working with a concept of spellcasting by visualising, drawing, visualising and drawing again. This one’s stated purpose is ‘powering down to power up’, or accessing self-sourced fire through down-regulation.

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Poem:

When I hear a raven in the fig tree

Declaring that the figs are not ripe,

I know the figs are nearly ripe

And that I won’t get to eat any.

—NS

E Q U I N O X - equal/night. At this time, the length of the day and the length of the night are roughly equal, in both of the Earth's hemispheres (unlike at the solstices, which mark the polarities of longest day/shortest night and shortest day/longest night). I'm increasingly of the belief that closeness with the cyclic time marked by these types of events is important for health. I've noticed that my own particular touchy health points tend to flare up when circumstances suck into the idea that time is only linear, and it makes sense to me because body is so inherently rhythmic. May you be merry in the space between as we lean towards winter.

//rose portrait by NS

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