‘My background in site-specific art installation instilled in me a deep understanding of the power of place and its hidden narratives. This foundation directly informs my current work, where I continue to explore the tangible world – real things, true stories – seeking not just the factual, but the surprising, even mystical elements embedded within them. Just as those installations transformed physical locations, I now aim to transmute lived experience and documented events into something unexpected and transcendent, revealing the extraordinary within the ordinary.’
My artist website is www.artsite.org.uk
Calling the River: the 72 Angels of the Shem HaMephorash
The Thames is a silver thread that flows through the city, uniting it as one and dividing it in two: the north bank and the south, the docks east of London Bridge and the grand palaces to the bridge’s west. It is a conduit for travel, not only physical travel from the source to the sea and beyond.
I plotted a series of imagined journeys made along the river by some of London’s most enigmatic and fascinating magicians: Doctor John Dee, embarking at Blackwall in 1583 on the first stage of his voyage to the mystical court of the Alchemist emperor Rudolf II in Prague; Aleister Crowley, taking ship in 1904 for Cairo where he would – allegedly – receive the wisdom of the ancients that was the foundation of Thelemic practice; and a few years later, the great Goddess-diviner Dion Fortune, priestess of Isis, walking the Thames in the moonlight.
To commemorate each of these voyages I have created sets of images that include rune casting and sigils* – cryptic spells that encode some kind of call or summoning, and which must be quickly dispersed or erased, by water, air, earth or fire.
I walked the Thames beaches in low tide and gathered stones. I painted runes on the stones and returned to the beach to cast the runes, leaving them on the foreshore to one day return to the sea.
Performance: I drew sigils in the sand then walked over them until they vanished. I drew sigils on paper and set fire to them on the foreshore the smoke rising into the air and dissipating. I copied dark spells from ancient grimoires onto black paper, then tried to burn them. But they would not burn! Instead, they kept floating away, and I could not recapture them! Up into the air they flew, and into the river.
Exhibited as digital slide shows on 3 screens.