Brighton-based theatre makers, performers, neighbours and dreamers Daisy Eris Campbell and Kate Alderton have been working together since staging the world’s longest play ‘The Warp’ in the 90s, directed by Ken Campbell. They recently produced and staged Daisy’s ‘Cosmic Trigger: The Play!’ along with many creative collaborators from The Mycelium Network.

In 2019 The Mycelium led a pilgrimage on a double-decker bus to the mathematical centre of CERN in Switzerland, and then on to Carl Jung’s garden. Because of a dream Kate had, the pilgrimage then added a visit to the artistic community of Damanhur in Italy to learn how to dance the phrase "show us so we can understand"(in the Damanhurian movement based language). The resulting ritual was performed at the centre of CERN, the world's highest-energy particle collider, and, more importantly for the pilgrims, the largest concentration of true Nothing in the known universe.

Apiary director and fellow pilgrim Leslie catches up with Kate and Daisy to recall this journey and reflect on what they playfully term 'Dreamaturgy'.

Leslie: Can you describe the process that you're working on right now?

Daisy: I am in an interesting place at the moment because I have been following a kind of narrative unfolding. A combination of what I call ‘myth fudging’, as well as seeing what the story wants to be. This process has carried me through since I wrote Cosmic Trigger, and turned out to be the beginning of an initiatory sort of artistic magical journey, which steered me very well, and blew my mind constantly.

Somewhat tongue in cheek, my dad used to say that there are four choices open to the artist. One: you can distract and entertain and therefore help to sustain the status quo. Two: you can pose as exposing wrongs, but actually help to sustain the status quo. Three: you can expose wrongs and bring about change (nigh on impossible according to my dad because if you really know what’s going on you can be sure they’ve got something on you..)

But their might just be a fourth choice: to pose as exposing wrongs, but in fact deceive, but with such a wilful mix of truth and lie, research and fantasy, as to send the status quo hunting for needles that nobody’s lost in haystacks which don't exist, thereby distracting from the ensuing release of hitherto imprisoned forces which will bring about change but of an unpredictable nature.

So that has been my choice as a working artist, like with Cosmic Trigger. Let’s make it look and smell like a play, but let’s hold the intention that we actually release hitherto imprisoned forces in such a way that change will happen for all of us, hopefully the audience, and maybe even beyond.

Then, while we were putting the CERN pilgrimage together, I stumbled upon what I now call choice five, which is an Alan Moore quote — “to create a narrative so utterly complex and so endlessly self-referential that it becomes, to all intents and purposes, alive.”

I'd already been playing with the metaphor of mycelium. The mycelium is the network of fungal threads that create pathways in the soil structure. And when enough of these threads cross, a mushroom will appear seemingly overnight.

I found mycelium a useful metaphor for underground culture, because here are all these artists beavering away, like we're kind of carving something in the subsoil. But we are crossing our threads with all the others who are genuinely following their deepest impulses. And a mushroom may well appear in the above ground. This mushroom might take the form of an actual art piece, or it might take the form of a new movement, or a new consciousness even, and the world above can see this mushroom and probably will begin to commodify it. But what they cannot see is this incredible network of underground threads.

So I have this idea of feeding the mycelium, just as a gardener must feed the soil. So you achieve wonderful cultures by really nurturing those points where people cross, but also nurturing each individual thread's trust in its own process, and thereby this networked narrative will become, to all intents and purposes, alive.

I can only speak for myself, but the sense in the run up to the pilgrimage was that there was an explosion of synchronicity, a tsunami of meaning and yet more pointers to the deeply weird nature of reality.

A dream that Kate had was a big part of the CERN Pilgrimage. In her dream we had to go to Damanhur and learn how to dance the phrase ‘show us so we can understand’. So it's the three year anniversary on Saturday since we immanentised the Eschaton at CERN. I would say leave it a mystery

I feel that these three years have genuinely been a response to that question “show me so I can understand”. But sometimes the understanding has been really thin and the doubt and the confusion that I've experienced in the last three years has really knocked me on my arse a lot of the time.

So in terms of process, I have now gained this profound trust that nature stories: nature has a story force that powerfully takes us to the next stage of whatever this human project is all about. And we meddle with the story at our peril. Because once we impose a mythology of capitalism or a mythology of Christianity or any great overarching theory of everything; rationalism or scientism or materialism, we actually start to kill the mycelium that is building stories that need to be told, the stories that the deepest, deepest forces need to tell. 

And so my grand conundrum at the moment is the question of what does a narrative-based creative do when the first round of narrative has become alive? So alive you can't report on it anymore. Which synchronicity would I choose? Which dream? It is just all extraordinary now it's come to be the truth and the reality. Choice five has come alive! But what do you do as an individual creative in the midst of that? It's a real conundrum for me because I don't want to act in a meddling way. I want to act from genuine, deep intuition from here on in. And so I must adopt a kind of ecstatic readiness.

That's all I can conclude. And it's really hard because I want to know - what's the next big show? Should I maybe write a book? But all of this is forced and largely ego based. And so I wait. That's kind of where I'm at at the moment. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to articulate that, because that's the clearest I've been in a long time!

Leslie: What you just said reminds me of the Maya Angelo quote, "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you"

Daisy: That's really good. That hit home. There's an untold story, but also the story is not just mine. So I suppose finding and learning more and more mycelium-like ways of structuring any endeavours. That probably means moving away from authorship and the idea of the individual visionary. But yet for me personally these don't often spark up the ego enough to get the engine firing to get the thing sort of generating. But it's an incredibly creative, fertile time nonetheless. The dreams are profound and the personal growth is extreme, it's all happening.

Leslie: Kate, what is your process at the moment. Your research?


Kate: I just want to hold those two words. Ecstatic readiness. I love that so much. I'm always and forever steeped in dreaming, no matter what it is I'm up to. I was thinking back to what you said, Daisy, about Cosmic Trigger and that being a catalyst for things that we had no idea about.

I was looking at the program the other day, and at the very end of my bio in that programme, I put as a weird little joke, Kate is a member of the Dream Fishing Society. The Dream Fishing Society didn't exist at that point. It didn't mean anything. It was just a weird name. And in the last three years, the Dream Fishing Society has become an active, alive, populated, busy place.

So I suppose what I'm up to at the moment is thinking about the individual versus the collective. My interest in dream work in the last three years has really been tunnelling down into how to work with dreams, both as a community and as individuals, so that we're working with the images, with the dream visitors, with the landscapes of dream, not only from an individualistic perspective.

I’m in Jungian Analysis at the moment, which is amazing and vital, and we look at symbols and what they might mean to my psyche, my dreaming, the archetypal and the collective unconscious.. But I'm also really curious about what happens when we work with dreams and don't only relate the symbology, the landscapes, the visitors, the people, to our own psyche or unconscious, or even our collective one. So we don't put ourselves in the centre of the dream. Rather, we start to engage with the dreams and the essence that they have, and the wisdom that they have in their own right.

So there's two ways that I've been really looking at and training in that. One of them is social matrices dreaming through The Centre of Social Dreaming. In a social dreaming matrix, we gather together in community to share dreams, and we let the dreams speak for themselves. So they have a chance to be shared and be spoken beyond interpretation, beyond us concretising the meaning of the images or the symbols or what we experience. We just let the dreams and the energy of those dream visitors, symbols and visions stay alive and be alive and keep dreaming through us and see what happens when one symbol, and one dream gets to speak to another dream beyond having to be attached to our psyche. Beyond our wanting to pin meaning endlessly onto things, which I think can really stop dreams from unfolding what they have to offer us, particularly on the planet now.

I think we spoke about it a lot during the Cerne to CERN trip, because so many of the dreams that we were all having, not just me, were really clear embodied dreams from particular places on the planet. We dreamed of Cae Mabon, and Damanhur, and of the Long Man of Wilmington. I'm really passionate about this- what happens if it's not us dreaming about the land? What if the land is actually dreaming through us, and asking us to act on its behalf or at least to hear what it has to say? I think that when we can work collectively, I suppose dream activism is a lot about that, we can go to those places and find out what the land is asking of us, particularly at this time on the planet.

And then the other thing I've been doing in the last three years is training in Dream Tending with Steven Aizenstat, at Pacifica Graduate School. So he's in the lineage of Jung, Hillman and Woodman who are all from the same tree and roots that I'm passionate about.

Dream Tending is a one-to-one version of working with dreams. It's looking at what happens when we don't concretise meaning when we hear and experience dream symbols and dream images. Rather than encountering a tiger in a dream and deciding what that might means about ‘my maleness’ or ‘my wildness’, what happens if we actually engage with that image as a living-body presence, and find out what Tiger is about, what that particular Tiger is bringing into being through our dreaming? That way, there's an energy and an essence inside the living imagination in dreams and in dream images that can really come alive in the physical body I feel: through art, through movement, through collective activism. It can really change waking-life exponentially when we allow the forces and the energies of what is inside a dream to come through us in the waking world. I think interpretation always has its place, but interpretation for me, or at least only interpretation, stymies the fullness of the dream process. It contains the dream into a cup of meaning that says ‘this means that and that's that - I understand it now’

I'm really curious about how we can keep the dreams dreaming. It’s so interesting because it’s a reflection from the dreaming world of the conundrum around this deeply human desire to box everything up and tie it up with a bow. It seems like the message is that desire is becoming more and more destructive. We've got to let it be and see what it wants to be. And the tigers might want to be tigers.

Leslie: We keep talking about the CERN trip. Let's go into talking about that a bit more.

Daisy: I think it's important to know that as we stepped out into that trip, we really stepped out in total unknowing and with a spirit of pure fun. Bill Drummond once said to me, “if we knew why, we wouldn't be doing it”, which became our mantra. It turns out to actually have quite deep roots in chaos magic, and all sorts of magical approaches. But it really blew my mind when I first heard it. I suppose that phrase, if we knew why, we wouldn't be doing it, allows you to have a deep structure, that forward momentum that the story needs to kind of start unfolding, but it also refuses to meddle.

Then added to that, the pilgrims were starting to get very interested in Eric Wargo's book Time Loops in which he argues that most paranormality can be explained if we just accept the fact that we can sometimes remember the future. So that became our second mantra: this has all already happened. So all we have to do is remember what happened in the future and do that. And if we remember something that doesn't end up happening, it's just that it was a wrong memory of the future.

The initial intention was simply to go to the centre of CERN, the Large Hadron Collider. So when I say the Centre, I don't mean like the actual sort of built up reception area. What I meant always was the centre point of that 27 kilometer circle of nothing. And this was because of Gnostic ideas about the true nothing being the real nature of God, and CERN was the highest concentration of nothing in the known universe. If we're people seriously interested in nothing, then we ought to make a pilgrimage to the heart of the highest concentration of nothing in the known universe. A bus load of nutters would come with me. We'd have a hilarious story to tell. I'd get a show out of it at the other end. That was kind of the small ego thoughts that lurked for me around this trip. But it became obvious really quickly that it had captured some kind of imagination. It ended up, as I say, being 69 pilgrims on a double Decker bus heading for the centre of Nothing. But then John Higgs, the author said to me, well, look, I'm not going to go be in CERN on the 23rd of April. I'm going to be in the other Cern, 

, which is the Cerne giant, the chalk figure on a hillside in Dorset with the enormous cock. And I thought, this is brilliant. This is absolutely brilliant. If we start there, it can be Cerne to CERN, the large hard on to the large Hadron!

So here is a good example of how one meddles with the narrative and then steps back. So I thought, well, John using a dodgy pun to get out of having to come on the bus isn't the greatest story. But if Kate would dream that that's where we're meant to start, then that would work, wouldn't it? So then I commissioned Kate to have a dream. But I didn't tell her what about? She just had to report in on dreams. And it didn't take long until she had dreamt that the pilgrimage began. The only other chalk man in the country. There are other chalk figures. But the only other chalk man, which was right near where she lived at the time, is the Long Man of Wilmington. And she was having a whole dream that the pilgrims were all arguing about where we should begin the pilgrimage. And she said, I think we should begin at the Long Man of Wilmington. So I took that as proof positive. She just dreamt up the wrong chalk figure. But fine, close enough.

It was noted that we were going from the enormous ancient cock to the most cutting edge feminine principle of the Great Nothing, the great circle of Nothing - were we involved in some sort of fertility rite?. We had months now to prepare for what we were going to do. But we also knew if we knew why, we wouldn't be doing it. So nothing could get locked down too soon and nothing could be done unless we really felt we were remembering it from the future. And this is where certain collective principles came in. Kate began to track everyone's dreams in the run up, people were tracking their synchronicities. There were endless email threads that were allowing us to track what was coming up from the collective unconscious. And of course, added to this, one of the early things that happened was I approached the Liverpool Arts Lab to see if they fancied coming along on this pilgrimage.

Get this, it turned out they were planning their own pilgrimage to Switzerland for the same time period! Because they wanted to go to Carl Jung’s garden, where Carl Jung had created his garden on the banks of Lake Lucerne and carved into this stone. And that is where he had his dream of Liverpool; he dreamt that Liverpool was the pool of life - but that's a whole other rabbit hole of extraordinary synchronicity, particularly for the Liverpool contingent of the Mycelium. But I hadn't approached them based on that. I just said, you want to come to CERN? And they said, man, we're already planning a pilgrimage to Switzerland to go to this Jung place. We said, let's combine it all. So then Jung joined the party, you see. And so now it was Cerne to CERN to Lake Lucerne!

Then Kate told me she'd had another dream. She dreamed, as I mentioned earlier, that we had to go to the artistic and magical community of Damanhur in Northern Italy and learn their ancient dance language. The phrase that we had to learn was, Show us so we can understand.

But Kate didn't know that Damanhur really does have an ancient dance language! She just assumed that was part of her dream. So then it was like, oh, man, I’d better try and make this happen. I had a few contacts in Damanhur. I'd been there a few times. So I got in touch and they were captured by this whole extraordinary caper. And they let us camp on their football field. And we declared we would put on a show for them in Italian(!) by way of an exchange for learning how to dance this phrase ‘show us so we can understand’.

These pieces of the puzzle all kind of came together. And the extraordinary people, just an incredible mixed bag of magicians and artists, undertakers, rock stars, dreamers, all sorts of kooks and wonders, and off we went to reset the world. One of the rules we had was that any rituals we conducted throughout the pilgrimage had to be done with everyone wearing false teeth. This was so there was no chance of forgetting The Cosmic Giggle. But I think one of the things I've had to grapple with in the three years that followed has been losing my sense of humour somewhat because it all got so real…

Leslie: There's a responsibility because of that tendency to have to explain and pin down the mystery that creates its own entropy. But there's this other type of structural responsibility in keeping things open and present. I guess, this is why you have this ‘dream tending’ Kate is talking about. I think that's got so much potential to help us to live in that newer open ended narrative because we all dream. That our dreams can remain alive and can continue after they've been dreamed. There's also a discipline to it, because not everybody dreams because they don't have the discipline of it. There's the method of asking your dreams to speak to you for example and to recall them and so on. I mean seriously, the possibilities within them. It is extraordinary how you both dream more and remember them more.


Kate: But just thinking about what you're saying about the mystery and the uncertainty, I feel like that is one of the greatest challenges we have as a planet at the moment. To find ways to constantly create situations where we can practice grappling with uncertainty without putting spokes in the land of meaning and definiteness so that we can encounter what is actually coming towards us and is actually present. And I feel like collective dreamwork and social dreaming, community dreaming, is a place where that can really be practised because there is no concrete meaning that comes through it. You have to invite in whatever dreams come, and then look at what you've got and then look at what multiple types of meanings there might be.

I feel like a real place to work that muscle as a community is encountering the mystery of collective dreams. In the lead-up to the pilgrimage we did a lot of intentional dreaming, to see if we could dream the future of what had happened when we got there. Daisy referenced the work of Eric Wargo. After a while it became impossible to tell if we were dreaming the future, or if we were working with the dreaming of the present and creating the future from that. The level of synchronicity, collective dream symbols, colours and symbology we experienced became so specific the further into that journey we sailed as a dreaming community.

Our dreams were coming through every morning on an email thread with multiple images of the same thing and multiple similar colours and multiple encounters with similar beings. It was really an extraordinary privilege to dream with so many people for such an extended period of time. That's the longest I've ever been in community dream work.

Daisy: But also actually coming out of this conversation is something that I have been thinking about a lot, which, in terms of narrative, is the vital importance of the Telos, which is the pull. To have a teleological viewpoint is to feel that we are being pulled somewhere, that our evolution is purposeful. As Ken Wilber puts it, we have an innate pull from dirt to divinity. The Telos is the pull. So for example the telos for a grass seed is the sun. The sun ‘pulls’ the seed up towards itself. And so in storytelling, we need a Telos, we need a sense that we are going somewhere, that’s what allows the magic to begin. And that kind of undertow of us all knowing we're about to embark on this (on paper), completely barking mad escapade - 69 of us sleeping on a coach and camping in the freezing cold and all of the madness of it as a logistical exercise, it was truly batty. But the pull of that, I think, activated and pulled at the unconscious in a deep way.

Our commercial storytellers have - for a long time now - used the apocalypse as their Telos because you can't use the transcendental as your Telos anymore. It's just not cool and it doesn't pay or whatever. And so instead, we've been fed this sense that we're being pulled to the end days. Maybe certain temperaments will get pulled to action because of that terror, but I think this kind of story tends to burn us out as well. There needs to be a joyous Telos to really pull the joyous magic through.


Kate: We need the pull towards the transcendent utopian future, but we need to know that as we make the journey our knees are bleeding and our hands are in the soil and it's raining and it's difficult. I think the transcendent function comes when you can integrate that. It is both difficult and beautiful that they can exist at the same time. That death is coming, but it's not only horror, that there is beauty in darkness. It’s that union, that principle of the union of the opposites that brings the third thing- it’s then that the transcendent function can happen. I think, because we're living in a time where polarisation is so prevalent that it has to be black or white. It has to be this or that.. It's very hard to reach the third way when so many of our systems, political, social media and debate itself are based around picking a side.

Daisy: It's really hard to find the middle way or the third way. The other way. And the other will be the alien. It will be the unknown.

Kate: That’s why we need practices that help us flex that muscle of grappling. What if it isn't what I'm saying, or what you're saying? What if it is something entirely different that neither of us can think of? And I think that the way that we can do that is through dialogue. Whether it's dialogue, through dreams or story, there is something that often occurs between two sides, two people. Which David Bohm wrote an amazing volume called On Dialogue, he talks a lot about that.


Daisy: My dreams often have to remind me to be funny. Because when the mystery presents itself, it has a tricksy nature, it can make you think you're going to be able to solve this. That's the sort of human element that wants to go: “I think I might be about to tie it all up with a bow!” And that can send you mad. I think trying to get the mystery into your head will send you mad. Whereas holding that you are dancing with a mystery that is unsolvable, it's an unknowable mystery, but you do have some capacity to dance with it; it’s freeing. But the ego doesn't like that, I think. Also I was thinking about what you were saying about your knees are bleeding and it's raining and it's hard. And I think we all know those feelings, particularly over the last three years. And again, the function of the Telos tells you: ‘and yet keep crawling’.

That's what people are losing sight of. We feel like we're crawling and our knees are bleeding, but we don't have a sense what we're crawling towards. And that's the work of the artists and the mystics and the magicians and the more visionary activists. The story can't be what we don't want anymore. We've got to start building a story of what we do want - but it doesn't feel as entertaining. It's not fraught with the same stakes, the same conflict. But finding a way to create the narrative space for the third thing to emerge is fundamental.

So what happened as a result of the Cern pilgrimage was that through the dream space, it became apparent that we had conceived. There'd been all these jokes about someone's going to end up pregnant at the end of this mass fertility rite. And then it turned out we had collectively conceived a magickal orphan…

So I was reading up about this, and discovered that many magical groups had worked to create the birth of an autonomous being, if you like, filled with their collective intentions. But ours was an accident, a love child! It is currently taking the form of a wooden baby. So people have pledged to look after this child that we conceived and we pass it around on the 23rd of every month, this wooden child, and it's its birthday on this coming Saturday, 23rd April. So there's going to be about 15-20 Orphan Keepers in Snowdonia, at their birthplace. And it's going to be interesting because I can feel in myself and in others a desire for this story to do something, go somewhere. Like pushy parents: ‘let's try and send my child's story in a particular direction’ - but maybe this child really is simply passed forever on the 23 of April. It's not much of a story, but it's sort of deeply profound as well. It's really interesting as we come together to hold back on the meddling and to just enjoy the unfolding. Yeah, it's a kind of interesting tension and I don't know what that tension gives rise to yet.


Kate: It can be so hard not to lay things on top of things, to not give them space enough to become what they are actually destined to become. Because The Orphan came from dream space, they are a dream figure that has carefully, expertly, slowly, tenderly been lifted from the fertile soil of deep, deep dreaming across the border into waking reality, always following where it wants to go. It's been clear so far along that journey what its essence wants to do, because it came so clearly through that dream you had. But here in the waking world, I think it's much harder to keep that awake consciousness back a little bit, and keep dream consciousness in dialogue with whatever dreaming is. Whether it's a dream figure that's come, or piece of art that comes across or a creative project. I think that is the challenge: to find that balance between meddling and surrendering.

Daisy: Each of us is born into a heavily meddled-with reality. So just undoing the pre existing meddling is a lifetime's work in itself. And yet we must act and we must create.

Kate: And it's a perfect balancing game to play throughout life, isn't it, to find the balance between deep listening and action and not only getting stuck in one? Because we could sit forever deep listening and do fuck all and nothing would ever happen and nothing would ever change, or you could constantly act and miss all the deep treasure that's held inside the mystery.


Leslie: Isn't that also an element of dramaturgy? So far we are talking about acting in life, but the actual dramaturgy of acting in theatres, understanding those tensions and what conflict is and what all the dramatic elements are so that you can tell a decent story that captivates. This is what's so funny about dreamaturgy as a concept that we talked about before recording. I love it. Maybe we're just on the cusp of dreamaturgy as an actual art, something that's actually studied, and accepted into the mainstream. No longer delegated to the esoteric realms of magic, mysticism and the supernatural.

Daisy: Well, I think the theatre itself - unlike filmed art form - has this added archetype of the stage. The stage and curtain-up is a telos like no other. The fact that a group of creatives gather and they set a date and say on that day, on that stage, the curtain will go up and the audience will be sat there and something will happen. That's the undertow. That's the pull. That's why we crawl on our knees through the dirt. And all we ask of you is your eyes. Actually I was reading somewhere - I need to look deeper into it - that theatre and healing have only relatively recently been thought of as two different things.

Leslie: Well, ritual is at the heart of the history of theatre right? The Dionysion rite?

Kate: I mean, Epidaurus - which is the birthplace of modern medicine in Greece outside Athens - what you had there was a combination of theatre, song, ritual, body work, nutrition and dreaming. People would pilgrimage there, and spend their days weaving and experiencing all of those forms of healing arts. The Telos was towards working deeply with dreams at the end of the day. To enter the sacred chamber of dreaming ‘The Abaton’, with the intention that they might incubate a healing dream and then work with what came through the dream as a form of medicine: either by receiving a direct healing in the dream, or by taking an action on behalf of the dream in the waking world.

So that was the kind of inner abaton/ dream chamber which Damanhur has attached to the side of the Temples in the mountain. So it's interesting, I think you're absolutely right. There is this kind of re-fusing of those modalities which have been separated, much like science separates so many different things.

Daisy: You're exactly right. That's exactly what all the conversations I'm having are about at the moment. Everyone being allowed to come out of our boxes of expertise and cross pollinate again, I think, in whole new ways. But the question of ego, I think is a really fundamental one, because it's definitely got power as an engine, but it's definitely got such destruction.

Leslie: Well, if it's just coming from one person and not a collective engine. Right. Every part is a channel, including the author that wrote the play. Maybe it can be something a little bit more inter-dimensional than just, okay, end on staging and writer to actor to stage. Theatre makers are knocking down the fourth wall all the time. Also there is something about presence, connection, being willing to go there and have that intimacy at all. A lot of people won't look each other in the eye. Right. There's something about being able to do that that allows the dream to come through, the intimacy of life itself. That's what I've always appreciated about theatre, especially the aliveness of it.

Daisy: And this goes back to Martin McCluhan’s The medium is the message. I've arrived at a deep revulsion about how market forces underlie so much of our culture. I find making peace with that almost impossible. I just so yearn to know what a world would look like if you just produced the art that your soul told you to produce, and that's all we were ever asked to consume: the real genuine outpouring of soul-makers. And I'm not saying all culture is currently made by sellouts. No, not even slightly. We all swim in these waters, we all have to survive. But we've got to somehow square that circle. Each of us in our own ways need to find the structures that allow for minimal meddling.

Leslie: I think this is all part of the role of the artist, is to remind everyone, like, hey, this is worth appreciating.

Daisy: But it’s also the magical nature of life. I mean, I find it just extraordinary that if you absolutely, fully and totally adopt the rationalist materialist mindset in your early years, you can actually get through life without anything weird happening to you! I mean, that to me, is proof of magic more than anything else. You can actually put a spell on yourself so profound that you will never encounter the weird. Wow, that's extraordinary. So, in the same way, if your powerful deep desire is money, you'll make it happen. It will be at the expense of probably a lot of other aspects of your life and maybe others lives as well, but you can do that. But I think the nature of the artist is that isn't generally what motivates most of us.

Leslie: I mean, that's another thing that's happening. We're somewhat talking about the decentralisation of story. Other people at the moment are trying to decentralise our monetary systems with the surge in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.

Daisy: And actually, if you think of its deep structure, it's mycelic (like mycelium) again. So to me, anything that's pulling towards the mycelic, more like the neural pathways kind of deep structure is for the good. My favourite metaphor for transformation, which I've probably bored you both with before now, is from Barbara Marx Hubbard. She talks about the butterfly forming inside a chrysalis. What actually happens inside that cocoon is that imaginal cells begin to appear. That's what their name is. These imaginal cells appear one by one. But as one appears the old body of the caterpillar immediately kills it off. Then one appears over here and the body of the caterpillar kills it off. But then two appear over here at the same time and the caterpillar only manages to kill one of them off! And then three appear here and four appear there. And this battle ensues between the old body of the caterpillar and the new body of the butterfly that's apparently quite violent. And we know we want a butterfly, we want a beautiful butterfly to spread its wings, but it can't do that unless the old body holds its form and fights.

The new cells literally cannot constellate, without the fight put up by the old body. And the new cells are clearly on the rise... I mean everyone I meet is an extraordinary genius these days. I only meet mind bogglingly visionary, extraordinary people everywhere. It feels like there's more than enough of us imaginal cells to spread our wings any day now. But we're still being killed off by the body of the caterpillar. So that's the bit of the process that we must be in. For me it's a really hopeful perspective because it also allows for some compassion for the reactionary forces. Might we be able to bless the dinosaurs. Could they simply be holding the old body steady in the best way they know how whilst we imaginal cells find each other? And maybe in this story, it’s not one imaginal cell that gets crucified by the caterpillar soon after his emergence, it’s tens of thousands of imaginal cells! What are you going to do, crucify us all?

Kate: I love that metaphor of the imaginal cells and the necessity of the struggle to hold up the old structure. I find that such a hopeful metaphor. Particularly because dreams, deep imagination, art, creativity and our capacity to create enough space - to be able to capture glimpses of the future through those, is where the work is. We need enough time, space, opportunity in community to be able to catch glimpses of the imaginal cells as they come into being.

Leslie: It also reminds me, it was Easter when we did the CERN trip. And I remember looking into the Eucharist a bit, and also the act of Communion and resurrection. It's not that the imaginal cell just dies. It also gets resurrected and then gives eternal life. And transubstantiation and the sacrament of eating the body of Christ!

Daisy: That’s the nature of the sacramental universe. Our world becomes a living artwork that we can kind of interact with. And therefore, the stakes stay high. Thinking about it in terms of story, I notice that a lot of modern thought is essentially a brand of Gnosticism: “I'm creating the whole of reality inside my own personal head”. But if you’re creating it all inside your own head, you kill the stakes of the story.

Leslie: To finish here is the quote from 

“On the whole, you could say that if you're defending your opinions, you are not serious. Likewise, if you were trying to avoid something unpleasant inside of yourself that is also not being serious. A great deal of our whole life is not serious. And society teaches you that. It teaches you not to be very serious, that there are all sorts of incoherent things and there is nothing that can be done about it and that you will only stir yourself up uselessly by being serious. But in a dialogue, you have to be serious. It is not a dialogue if you are not. Not in the way I'm using the word. There is a story about Freud when he had cancer of the mouth. Somebody came up to him and wanted to talk to him about a point in psychology. The person said, Perhaps I better not talk to you because you've got this cancer, which is very serious. You may not want to talk about this. Freud's answer was, this cancer may be fatal, but it's not serious. And actually, of course, it was just a lot of cells growing. I think a great deal of what goes on in society could be described that way. That it may well be fatal, but it's not serious."

Kate: So I'm going to read you this one. This is Russell Lockhart, who is again, one of the roots springing from the Jung tree. And yeah, it's running through me constantly, this one at the moment. He says - “the community that learns to operate on the basis of the circulating gift of dreams will be the community immune to the commodification of desire that so threatens the true potential of the human spirit.”

 is a playwright, dramaturge and nascent psychomagician. She wrote and performed Pigspurt’s Daughter, has been working with The KLF to build a pyramid of dead people, adapted and staged Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger and conceived and led the Cerne2CERN pilgrimage.

 is a performer, dream tending practitioner, collage artist and founder of The Dream Fishing Society. She’s passionate about accessing and working with the deep imagination held in dreams and creating spaces where we can reignite the art of dreaming-in-community.

DREAMATURGY

Author and practitioner Jemma Foster is the founder of experimental botanical studio Mama Xanadu and multi-sensory publishing house Wild Alchemy Lab. Antenna talks to Jemma about the next issue of 


Jemma Foster: We are a global collective of artists, academic researchers and occult practitioners. Our multidisciplinary practice explores nature, science and esoterica at the intersection of plants, planets and people.

Alchemy is the arcane art of transformation, the physical and psycho-spiritual practice of turning the basic elements of our existence into a unified field that is aligned with nature and the cosmos. It is an incremental process of recalibration that supports and informs how we are able to digest our experiences and consciously navigate the future.

Why is the cross-section of nature/science/esoterica important to you?

The relationship between nature, science and esoterica can be complex, fractured and polarising. Science and esoterica are often viewed as mutually exclusive. Occult practices are, by definition, concealed and shrouded in obscurity, which can exclude and isolate. Wild Alchemy Lab seeks to unify and demystify the mystery.

Your next publication is on the theme of water. Can you talk about the magic of water?

The classical elements of earth, fire, water, air and aether provide a lens through which to investigate how both we place ourselves, and are placed, within our environment. Each edition of the journal navigates an element. The last two were Earth and then Fire.

World cosmologies often describe our origins as watery, a place where gods dive into the deep for our creation, and its sweet taste becomes an elixir that sustains life. These cosmogonic waters are almost always dark and still, a reflection of our own beginnings – a cosmic void of amniotic fluid that gives birth to form.

Water is the communicator between the cosmos and Earth, integrating air and fire into the material realm. Elemental water is the tides within, the ebb and flow of our internal fluids and our emotional body. In Jungian psychology, it guides our feeling selves, our sensitivity to our environment and experience, our memories and psychic self.

What is one of your favourite articles in the upcoming journal?

Witnessing the AR content unfold, particularly when it involves new collaborations between artists that were previously unknown to each other, is where the real alchemy happens. Immersive pieces are an invitation to the reader to move beyond passive receptivity and to actively engage in the journal as a shared, embodied experience.

article that features a conversation between artist Eileen Hall and psychologist Dr David Luke on his current research into acts of weather control by the Wixárika, an indigenous group in Mexico.

Eileen is a visual artist and she painted a rain sigil for the piece. Composer and sound artist Jamie Perera has created a sonification of precipitation data in Bernalejos, a town in the state of San Luis Potosi, Mexico, an area sacred to the Wixárika. Listening activates the sigil as an act of collective dreaming, a communal prayer to manifest rain.

We just collaborated with you to create the AR piece the

 by Madame Blavatsky in the next of issue of WA water Journal.  Can you speak to why you have chosen to include the 

Playing on Neptunian concepts of illusion and fantasy, we explored the realms of dream vs reality with the mysteries of lost civilisations submerged by deluge, ideas first offered by Plato in his works 

.  In the 1880s, controversial mystic and occultist Madame Blavastsky transcribed the 

 which she claimed to be a secret ancient Tibetan text written in an ethereal language predating Sanskrit she called Senzar.  It details the pre-Atlantean civilisation of Lemuria which was said to have a liquid atmosphere and was inhabited by prehuman beings that were tall hermaphrodites with fluid form, 360 vision and reproduced by laying eggs.  

Do you have any upcoming artworks or productions you would like to mention?

Together with Camilla French, I am working on a series of short films and immersive installations exploring interspecies communication and person-plant linguistics. This involves documenting plant, mineral and fungal frequency recordings, along with world cosmologies narrated in threatened indigenous languages, and looking at sonification patterns that represent a shared tongue that transcends species boundaries.


The Journal will be released on the 12th of April and will be available to purchase at Apiary Studios and other outlets. 

Wild Alchemy – An Astro-botanical Guide to the Magic and Medicine of Plants 

Wild Alchemy – A Herbal Remedy Oracle Deck

 is due to be published by Laurence King next spring.

Follow Wild Alchemy @wildalchemylab and @mamaxanadu

Where the wild things grow

, creates elaborate, wearable sculptures that enchant the viewer as well as the wearer. Magnhild has made a career producing strange and almost supernatural characters which have been worn by Daphne Guinness, Björk and Erykah Badu, and celebrated in galleries such as

Norway's National Museum of Decorative Arts. There is something spectral and intangible, yet strangely familiar in the forms she creates. It’s like they come from a fairytale that we knew well as children but somehow forgot as we grew older. Jonah Emerson-Bell looks to gain a deeper understanding of the secret life of these creatures and the creative process behind them.

There is something spectral and intangible, yet strangely familiar in the forms she creates. It’s like they come from a fairytale that we knew well as children but somehow forgot as we grew older until one day, scrolling through Instagram, the Damselfrau account appears and suddenly that archetypal image comes rushing back to mind and something comes alive.

Magnhild has made her career producing strange and almost supernatural characters that she wears and photographs. Her artwork is made from a vast array of materials like fabrics and “shiny bits”, tassels, hair and pompoms (which are a favourite of hers) or whatever she finds that will do the job. Each mask is unique and feels like it has its own personality and biography. Intrigued by these unusual and beautiful beings, I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the secret life of these creatures. What I got instead was an exploration into the creative process which is both otherworldly and profound.

JEB: How did you arrive at making masks as your form of artistic expression?

Looking back, masks had always been there, but they never appeared that clearly to me. Number one I didn't know it could be a job, honestly. But when I moved to London from Norway in my late 20s, there was this really huge, beautiful, fashion and clubbing environment. You’d make an outfit for the night out of tape and egg cartons and whatever and get photographed at the party, and look at the other people.

This was all a new universe to me and it was really, really inspiring. And it sort of informed me from zero to 100, very fast, of what you can do with a little. So I made outfits for these parties. One night I made a mask for an evening and this format pretty much just stuck with me from that one experience. And at the time, I was working in a vintage designer shop, and it was very small. My boss was very nice to me, and he let me sit and just fiddle behind the till. There wasn't a lot of space behind the till so it was kind of limited to what you could make. But you can do a lot with a little on a face. And I remember very well this piece I made where I was just like, “oh, I've landed somewhere completely different.”

This was in 2012, I think. And I made a green mask called Stikker, and I felt like I had arrived in a country or like I'd landed somewhere where the work could live properly. Then I kind of understood that this is the thing now and I don't have a choice really, I just do this stuff and make it work.

JEB: I love that idea of arriving in a country or at a place because, looking at your work, It seems really otherworldly, like these characters are coming from another land, or maybe that's just my projection.

Oh, that's great. I don't know what the intention is; other people tend to see what I do better than I can. But for me, I don't come from a place with a long line of mask culture. Well, not since Christianity took over anyway. So there was nowhere in me and how I grew up that I could go and look for reasons why this appeared here, and why it became natural for me. But when I was a kid my favourite thing to do was to make paper dolls. And those are flat things that you fold onto things. And my mask format is a flat thing that you form and just put onto your face. So I kind of feel like it might be like an arm that comes from the past, from this childhood experience of making a two-dimensional thing into a three-dimensional thing or trying to give a two-dimensional thing more body. But I didn't feel like there was much of an environment available to me with the masks because of my culture.

I come from such a fashion kind of culture where masks are very 

, I mean at the time they were anyway. Now they're everywhere, which is great. But at the time, it was kind of limited to what idea you had about a mask in contemporary Western society. So I felt kind of blind there for a while. In my head, I couldn't find anywhere to actually take the work and it was quite frustrating.

I'm also sort of a magpie-ish type, I collect a lot of stuff and so I always have a lot of like bits that I don't really have plans for. I think that also coincided with this idea that there's actually this place, where I could put all these bits. So I think I had kind of collected materials for a very long time for this project, I just needed somewhere to put it. All of this came together with this one piece that told me exactly who I was in the work and things became very clear. Now, I see that I can move a lot within that environment, but the DNA is still right there. So I can do stuff that looks quite different but I recognise myself, thank God, and other people also recognise me in the work. And I love that.

JEB: You say that you don’t come from a culture of masking. However, I think personally, I think that club culture, rave culture, and festival culture have a tradition of masking and costuming. And that makes me think about things like Mardi Gras and Carnival, and the energy of those events where people express their alter egos or desires through their costumes. And I wonder if you connect with that or think about that in your process? Or if you do think about that at all?

No, I think very little. When I make stuff, it’s 100% play, I mean, it's brainless. It's just a play scenario for me. I try to keep it super light, and very crisp because I get bored super fast. If something's too hard. If something demands too much thinking of me, if there's too much problem solving, if I have to consider too much then I will put that thing aside and start two new ones. Because it's not, that's not the space where I feel delighted making and it's it for me, it's a place of sanity and health than where I kind of feel like I have sort of therapy within myself now.

JEB: I'm curious about how you think of this work? I think it's really easy to be like, “that's something that somebody is wearing on their face, so that must be a mask.” But do you feel like that limits the work or your idea of what the work can be?

I think the idea of a mask is accurate, I don't know, I'm still figuring out this stuff, and I probably won't figure it out before I die. Part of keeping it light and keeping it playful is not to demand too much from the work and not telling the work where it has to go. I always kind of wait for stuff to come to me. I don't hunt for things. I try to put myself in the way of things. So they might happen to me. As in, like, where does the work go? Is there a gallery? Is there a magazine? Is there an artist? Because then the language of the work is clear. It's doing its own talking, and I'm not murking it up. Because if I demand certain things from it, I will limit it from other things. So I've never tried to tell it what it needs to be. Is it a mask? Sure. But it could also be a picture. I mean, the object itself could be a picture. It could be many things. I honestly have no strong opinions about that. I kind of have to trust the work to do its own job, or it kind of doesn't deserve living. So the easier and more open for everyone is better for me.

JEB: When you're working do you start out with a set idea for what you are going to make? Or are you working more with the material like: “I’ll put this shiny thing with that shiny thing,” until the character emerges?

It starts with the shiny thing. When I make my own stuff, It always comes from the material. I’ve always collected a lot, it doesn't matter what it is. There's no hierarchy in materials for me, like gold and plastic will do the same job, or they will do the right job for the right thing. So yeah, it always starts with that. It's never really been hard to get the juices going. But if I'm a little bit uninspired, I'll just put my hands in boxes and just taste, just hand tasting, for like, what's the flavour? Like, what's the right flavour for today? There's always places to go in me to find the right connection with the material like, maybe you're wooly, you know, or maybe you need some clarity, and then from there, it's just organising materials. It becomes, pretty much, just putting stuff and sometimes they put themselves easily.

Sometimes you have to wait a while to find the last object that finishes it off. But that's for me when I work for myself. If I work for a client, they often come to it with pictures of something that inspires them, or a colour palette they like, and then I start from there. That's not a very hard place to start either, it’s just not how I work for myself. I’m not a mood wall type of person.

When I start making, I tend to find the right movie. I watch a lot of television and movies when I'm working because I found that music demands too much for me. So when I put on a movie it always has to do with the speed, I like fast, I like moving fast. I watch a lot of action movies and sci-fi and things that have a lot of pulse in them. And I will watch that movie kind of back to back to sort of keep the right pulse in the work. And one way is to sort of get myself pushed forward by that general pulse. But the other thing is, often these films have a lot of information in them. So they keep my eye awake, so I don't kind of fall asleep into the piece because that can happen. So it's nice to sort of keep the eye going, going, going, going. And that's the best space when you get good speedup and you have a lot of action going. And you feel the action in your work. It's the best thing.

JEB: What are you watching? Or what are you really excited to watch when you get in the studio?

All kinds of stuff. I watch a lot of action movies, but I’ll get into long periods of reality TV because the editing is fast. So you get a lot of energy and you can get into like 10 seasons of something and obviously, it demands nothing of you. So you're just watching a lot of that fast editing. But I keep coming back to this movie, 

. I love that movie so, so much because It's literally just a road movie that goes super fast with a lot of colour in it and a lot of humour. It is one of those films that I can handle watching over and over again. But of course any 

any or Villeneuve movie will do, he's not so speedy, but he's very cinematic. He has a huge scope and that's also very helpful, a lot of information and the music is always great in his films too. So that's kind of the environment that I work in. I like a lot of action.

I think that could also be why London has worked so well for me. In this place you grow older fast, because time is going faster here than I've experienced anywhere else. Because there's so much energy going. Also, I live at a very busy crossroads. And the building is not very soundproof. So I hear the police cars all the time. There's a lot of that kind of sound and I feel like that's feeding a lot as well, as far as the energy. And when COVID hit the energy changed a lot outside. And I felt that in the work that things got slower.

JEB: I'm curious about that slowdown when COVID hit and the world took a pause. How did that affect your practice?

The first lockdown was bewitching like it was amazing. I know it's a bad thing to say, but the change of energy was good in every sense in my body. The thing is, I haven't changed so much how I worked because I work from home anyway. I'm kind of a hermit and my husband is the kind of person that goes out and checks the world and it comes back and tells me about it. So at that time, he would go out with a mask and gloves and do the shopping and things and I would just be here and I would walk 10,000 steps inside the house just to get my gymnastics in and then I would get to work.

I still had a lot of clients because most of my work with clients is remote anyway, so it didn’t affect my work as far as demand. So I was lucky there. Looking back it seems like I’ve made a lot of masks but the time felt slower. And I think the look of the masks are slightly slower as well. There's more sort of bigger grips or like bigger clearer thoughts in them. But once it started picking up again, I definitely felt better. Once the sirens started going more, I felt better.

JEB: I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about the fact that we are now in a world where most people are wearing face coverings and masks?

No, this is life. My friend was like, “you should print your work on some masks.” And I'm like, “Nah,” because that's not what I'm doing. I know that I make masks, but I don't really necessarily feel that I make masks. I've kind of come at it from a sculpture place. I was never particularly interested in masks as a form or as a topic. It just kind of happened naturally.

I've been saying this now for 10 years and it's not getting any clearer to me. So maybe there's something that I'm not noticing. I think also, like we talked about earlier, it’s important to keep it really light and easy and not demanding certain things from the work so the work can make its own demands. That takes a lot off my shoulders because it means that I don't necessarily have to be responsible for what happens on the other side of it.

I mean, obviously, I made it so I'm responsible, but how a piece is perceived is going to vary from each and every person. So I can never really take on the experience of other people because they have their own life of information to put into that. And I love it when 10 different people see 10 different things in the same piece. But yeah, it's still kind of baffling to me. I still don't know how I ended up here. This is just sort of what it is now. And I mean, I'm grown up now. So this is probably what it is. I'm gonna have to live with this until I die.

Magnhild Kennedy is an artist based in Hackney, London. You can buy her art prints and silk scarves on her website at 

Jonah Emerson-Bell is an artist, tarologist and astrologer. He lives and works in Santa Fe, NM. You can find Jonah's work at 

The Mask is the Place

Leslie Deere is a multi-media artist working with sound, image and performance and virtual reality. Born in Tennessee, Leslie moved to London to study music, and is currently based in Glasgow where she is working on her new project ARRAY INFINITIVE, which merges meditative practice with experimental VR participation.  

She will hold a workshop with us at Antenna Gallery on Saturday the 26th of February.  See sign up info at the bottom of the article.  

Antenna: How would you describe your artistic practice today?

LD: My practice is very multi-media. A couple of years ago I created a book of photography and I’m about to do a series of screen prints, but the main focus of my larger scale projects the past several years has been on gestural audio-visuals.

Where did you first start experimenting with sonic art and visual interaction?

My BA was in Sonic Art. From that point I was interested in sculptural objects and sound, or physical form and sound. The sound and image making more gestural, performative work has been happening since 2016, through a Sound and Music residency at Music Hackspace in London.

You are currently working on a project Array Infinitive. Can you describe the research intention behind the project?

This is a follow-on from the Hackspace residency work, which used a Kinect camera to play sounds live. There was also a silhouette projection behind me that echoed my movements in real-time. At that time I was looking at turn of the twentieth century technologies and that crossover happening between technology and spiritualism, as well as the idea of working with that which is invisible or immaterial. Clara Rockmore ( a Lithuanian violin prodigy and theremin performer ) was an important reference. The theremin was seen as a weird and futuristic instrument at the time, because it is played without actually touching anything.

My current piece is now taking that idea into VR. I am researching this encounter in VR as a means to reach an altered state experience. I’ve been working with Dr David Luke of Greenwich University and Breaking Convention to measure participant ASC response. I’m also trying to find out if a shared group experience can be achieved through this technology, on a local network in a shared physical space, and whether or not people can tell a human is conducting the experience.

What experience do your participants have? Are they the composers or are they guided?

Participants go on a journey through sound and colour. The group is stationary and remain seated. The idea is to sink into a comfortable position, to look and listen - to sit in the colour red for instance, or be enveloped by Indigo. There isn’t anywhere to go or navigate towards in VR, the worlds are abstract and graphic, stripped back to geometric form where the colour impact is important.

How does the colour spectrum function in the project?

There are seven VR scenes that travel up the colour spectrum or chakra system. I’ve tried to keep the elementals intact, for instance an earthy base sound for the colour red. I recorded a cellist in Glasgow and for blue a three part harmony vocal.

Who are the artists or creators that have inspired along the way?

I’ve been looking a lot at artists that make work which is activated by the experience of being with it, such as Ann Veronica Janssens installations or James Turrell, or even Bridget Riley and Op Art. So there is a temporal or experiential quality that becomes durational and also symbiotic. Exploding Eye films, psychedelic mandalas and multi-media work of the 60’s. Pieces that illicit a response, such as Catherine Yass’ films or the Rothko Effect. I’ve been thinking about the sensorial onslaught of the Ballet Russes - short performances that combine music, movement and art — the joining of different disciplines simultaneously as a tidal motion to the senses.

You have mentioned artists such as Hilda Af Klimt as an influence on the project.

I really love her work aesthetically, her use of colour, the minimal nature of it. Hilda af Klint, Annie Besant and Agnes Pelton — again back to that turn of the twentieth century time period, it was ripe. I’m not a painter but the layering that Pelton did takes a very long time, and those paintings are hypnotic without having motion. The abstract nature of these women’s work and the ways in which they were communicating something intangible through painting. Images and form coming through them as channels onto canvas. Honouring the messages or downloads they received at that point in time — that took courage.

How do you intend the abstract visuals to function for the user or participant.

The visual palette in this VR work is abstract, fairly minimal and graphic. There are no figurative shapes. I did this intentionally hoping it would be easier to become immersed in it. In VR or CGI, working with objects that resemble humans is iffy, in that it can be cartoony really easily unless they are triple A game graphics, which this piece isn’t about.

How does the practice of meditation inform or guide the Affinity?

In group meditation people sit quietly and still in a room together. They just sit quietly and breathe together. That’s it. It is so simple but really powerful. That notion is what I’m inspired by here and trying to replicate for in this work. It has also been nice though when participants swivel their head, to look around the VR world, or reach out to grab an object floating by. But generally that act of ‘sinking into’ a position and being in a liminal space is something I’m trying to explore.


How is the project different from gaming?


Gamers, from my research thus far, tend to want to walk around or shoot something or teleport off somewhere. This experience is not active in the same way.  Its kind of like being in a mixed-media installation, in multiple realities at the same time. Meaning, the sound is immersive and loud and amplified into the space — but visually you are seeing bold colours and ribbons of light through a headset attached to your face. 

And then there is also a performance going on right in front of you, but you don’t see that in physical form, yet you can feel when air brush past or hear the floor creaking below. A few I have done this work for audience both in and out of VR, something really interesting opens up in this scenario.  This reconfiguring of perfromance, or what performance is/ can be whereby audience are having different experiences visually and in terms of presence and immersion, whilst also having a larger collective experience together.  I like the idea of different realities happening at the same time in a shared space.  The sound really become the cohesive element and anchors the experience.  

How do you see VR as affecting our lives and mental spaces? What do you hope for the future of VR integration in our lives creatively or psychologically?


During lockdown I discovered a VR group that held group meditations and group discussions. I would log on at a certain time and move my avatar to an outdoor space and onto a yoga mat-like object and take part in a mediation. All the teachers were Buddhist practitioners and had different formats, but at the end the teacher would have a few words with anyone who was up for sharing. It was fascinating being in the same virtual space together while being physically distanced and meeting people from all over the world.

I also just did my first freelance job in VR. I helped at an event for the UN Climate Summit, which was supposed to happen in Dubai but instead happened on VR a couple of weeks ago. It was really weird and interesting going to an induction session in VR with strangers. So with these sorts of things — gathering at a distance, teaching / learning, there is great potential. At the same time, I don’t like that Facebook has co-opted the term metaverse and their assertion into VR is not without its concerns, given how they’ve handled themselves up until now. I started this project before Meta existed and I’ve never had a Facebook account. Big tech is problematic. Can we use it for our own purposes? Creative people finding ways to use technologies for creative purposes and with good intentions — sometimes to make a political statement and sometimes to give you a certain experience.

You are running a workshop pilot at Apiary Studios this month. How do we sign up?

The sessions are running at Antenna Gallery on 26th of February at 12pm, 3pm, and 7pm. 

Array Infinitive

Stephen Romano is a collector, curator and private art dealer in Brooklyn, New York. Collecting since the mid-90’s he has championed esoteric and outsider artists through his Stephen Romano Gallery, and through curatorial collaborations such as The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick in Cleveland. Faye Dowling talks to Stephen about his current William Mortensen project, and his life spent working with esoteric and outsider art.

Antenna: Where did your interest in esoteric art begin?

Stephen Romano: It began when I was very young. I could see things, spirits in the shadows. I would make drawings of them and carry them in my pockets. My aunt, who was a fairly well known abstract artist in Montreal where we lived, saw these drawings one day and flipped out and proclaimed I was a prodigy. She began bringing me art supplies and also expensive art books on Dali, Rembrandt, Durer, and a big heavy book on Hieronymus Bosch, which miraculously I still have today.

Later in my 20's I went to community college in Sarnia. and University in Windsor, Ontario. In the 90’s I moved from Canada to New York City and became manager of 

. The gallery was renowned in the field of “Outsider Art”, celebrating artists who are outside of mainstream society — perhaps through a psychological or physical impairment, and have channelled their ordeal into making art. The famous artist 

But whilst I had access to these great masterpieces, I didn’t have the means to acquire any of it. A Henry Darger worth $25,000 then, and would be worth in excess of $400,000 today. So instead I focused on collecting vernacular and vintage photographs that had a paranormal feel to them.

I think my vintage photography collection is now in the thousands, and any serious collector will tell you how quickly we get to that number when we follow our obsession with passion. Over the years I’ve bought, sold, traded. The collection ebbs and flows to this day with enthusiasm or complete disregard, sometimes I forget about it for months on end, other times I’m immersed in it for weeks at a time.

I first came across your collection at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in 2014, with a show presenting both historical and contemporary artists. How did you develop your collection develop?

I’ve always found the affinities between the historical and contemporary art interesting, to amplify the relevance of both, at either end of the spectrum. The Morbid Anatomy “

” show was one of my pinnacle curatorial accomplishments, and I have yet to eclipse it. The artists I champion have been exhibited in some prestigious places including the The Met in New York and Gagosian Gallery. Some of my artists are currently touring in “Supernatural America”, curated by Robert Cozzolino, and the new Taschen “

”book from the Library of Esoterica. I am perpetually grateful that I have the opportunity to share these magnificent things, and hopefully enhance the quality of life for others.

You had physical space with the Stephen Romano Gallery in Brooklyn from 2014-16. You also work closely with galleries and collectors, as well as participate in events such as the Outsider Art Fair. Could you give us some insight your artistic community in New York?

I have done the Outsider Art Fair in New York with Ricco/Maresca, with private art dealers, and a couple on my own as Romano Art. Since I closed the gallery in 2016, I’ve been inspired to find other venues and avenues. I am working presently with the 

Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick in Cleveland

, where we have presented exhibitions including William Mortensen, occult artist 

. We also continued to collaborate here in Brooklyn with Morbid Anatomy curators 

 at the Fort Hamilton Gatehouse at the Greenwood Cemetery until 2019.

Your 2022 show schedule celebrates the 125th anniversary of William Mortensen, including a show at Gallery of Everything, London. When did you discover Mortensen’s work?

I first saw William Mortensen’s art in an exhibition while I was manager at Ricco/Maresca in 2000.

 I was rapt in awe by it every day. I could not believe how someone could be so innovative technically and so visionary in his subject matter at such an early time in the history of photography, and yet how the works still held up so vividly in a contemporary context, it just seemed bewilderingly timeless.

Several years later, I came upon an opportunity to acquire some works by Mortensen, it wasn’t as easy as not a lot of his work survived his feral methods. He didn’t edition prints, and often made only a handful of prints of each piece. But I was persistent and uncovered a whole collection of more than 40 works that were part of his personal collection, really sublime works. The big break came when we were able to acquire the bulk of the collection of Courtney Crawford, Mortensen’s first wife and muse. At that point the collection grew to well over 400 original works.

This past summer, I realised he would have been turning 125, a noteworthy anniversary, and I began to contact allies who also believe William Mortensen’s legacy needs to be preserved, including The Gallery of Everything, London which is currently exhibiting a collection of Mortensen's most exquisite pieces. 

James Brett, [the founder of Gallery of Everything] has been a great advocate for creative masters as Henry Darger, Martin Ramirez, William Edmondson, among other national treasures, and we are fortunate to have his support for Mortensen.

Can you tell us a little his place as a pioneer in manipulated photography? 


William Mortensen came to photography as self taught. He studied at the Art Student’s League in New York for a couple of years after being discharged from the army in 1919. In 1921 moved to Los Angeles with his fiancé’s sister, the well known actress Fay Wray, to whom he became a chaperone and guardian. Both their career’s skyrocketed, and Mortensen was soon to become one of the most highly sought after photographers in Los Angeles, working with some of the great silent film directors of the era, including Tod Browning, Ferdinand P. Earle, John Griffith Wray, Vincente Minelli, and of course Cecil B DeMille.

Mortensen had at his disposal an entire floor at the renowned Western Costume Company, where he was allowed to use the abundant resources of costumes, models, props, whatever he wanted for his own personal art.

Mortensen later moved to Laguna Beach in 1931, and opened a school and studio. There, far from the distractions and hedonism of Hollywood, was where he really immersed himself in perfecting his image making, and from 1932 through 1945-ish, also writing article for popular photography magazines and publishing books. 

Mortensen was never accepted amongst the “high art” society, and in fact was persecuted relentlessly by Ansel Adams who dubbed him, “The Anti-Christ”. He was relegated to a footnote in the cannon of American photographic history until a curator Deborah Irmas revived enthusiasm in his art by curating “The Photographic Magic of William Mortensen”, which toured from 1971 through 1980.

Slowly but surely, Mortensen’s star began to rise again, and with the advent of digital manipulation in photography and the ever increasing proliferation of goth culture, Mortensen’s occult images began to see new appreciation and reverence. And in 2014, Feral House published an in-depth monograph “American Grotesque - The Life and Art of William Mortensen”, which brought Mortensen to the attention of the mainstream and was given widespread distribution, attention and praise. 

You have also exhibited Mortensen at Dark Mofo Festival in Tasmania. How did the show come about and unfold?

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