Therapeutic Landscapes: Ritual, Folklore, and Wellbeing

Therapeutic Landscapes
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Bringing together researchers, practitioners, and thinkers exploring the intersections of place, culture, and health. From ancient folk traditions to contemporary therapeutic practice, these conversations ask what landscapes, physical, imagined, and remembered, do for us.

  1. 2d ago

    Between Land and Water: Dougal Kirkland on Wetlands, Queer Ecology and Emergence

    In this episode, Rebecca speaks with Dougal Kirkland, an artist and printmaker whose work explores archaeology, folklore, wetlands, queer ecology, drawing, writing, and the material processes of image-making. The conversation begins with Dougal’s drawing practice, and the way drawing has shaped his relationship with landscapes, archaeological sites, museum objects, and the act of looking closely. Dougal reflects on his time at Goldsmiths, his later postgraduate study at the Drawing School, and the importance of drawing as a way of thinking, observing, processing, imagining, and entering into relationship with place. At the centre of the episode is Dougal’s research into wetlands and bog landscapes, sparked in part by drawing Lindow Man at the British Museum. Dougal discusses the intimacy and unease of encountering a preserved bog body in a museum setting, and how this led him to imagine drawing Lindow Man back into the bog. Dougal shares the rich and complex world of bogs: their liminality, their position between land and water, their ecological importance, their folklore, their preservation of bodies and objects, and their association with portals, offerings, spirits, boggarts, will-o’-the-wisps, and other beings. Dougal also introduces ideas from queer ecology, reflecting on how bogs, wetlands, queer theory, marginal landscapes, fluidity, otherness, non-binary thinking, queer plants, bog bodies, and archaeological artefacts can open up different ways of understanding nature, history, identity, and belonging. The conversation moves through sphagnum moss, peat, Gunnera, botanical colonialism, bog bodies, the Weerdinge Men, ritual death, queer ancestry, votive offerings, the Roos Carr figures, and the possibility of seeing wetlands as places that hold ambiguity, transformation, resistance, and deep time. The episode closes with Dougal reading Emergence, his written piece that centres around the last day of Lindow Man and imagines him as a queer ancestor. The piece draws together archaeology, folklore, environmentalism, plant lore, queer ecology, bog landscapes, deep time, ritual, and the strange intimacy of what emerges from the peat. This is a conversation about the places that refuse simple categories: land and water, body and archive, death and preservation, human and more-than-human, history and imagination, ecology and myth. Links: Website: dougalkirkland.co.uk Instagram: @dougalkirkland Therapeutic Landscapes: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org

  2. Aug 10

    The Sacred Hoop: Kate Walters on Dreaming, Thin Places and the Living Landscape

    In this episode, Rebecca speaks with Kate Walters, artist and writer, whose paintings, drawings and writing explore the relationship between inner and outer landscapes, and the ways in which they unfurl into each other. The conversation begins with Kate’s current work around the sacred hoop, an image that has emerged from one of her paintings and has become increasingly significant in relation to the fragile interconnectedness of the natural world. Kate reflects on the young girl who appears in this work, a figure connected with Psyche, threshold states, the inner child, and what she describes as a knowing that is carried through the body, the dream, and the image. Rebecca and Kate discuss the importance of dreaming in Kate’s life and practice, including the way dreams have guided major life decisions, informed her creative process, and helped her make sense of the deeper currents moving through her work. Kate also speaks about shamanic practice, psychoanalytic work, animal knowing, attention, intuition, and the importance of noticing what appears through paint, marks, writing and the body. The episode explores Kate’s process in the studio, including her use of both hands, non-dominant hand drawing, closed-eye painting, self-made inks, and the gradual process of entering the altered, receptive state from which images can emerge. They also discuss the way wild places can intensify dreaming, sharpen perception, and allow a deeper relationship with animals, landscapes, wilderness, and spirit. This is a conversation about creativity as a form of deep listening: to dreams, to animals, to the natural world, to the unseen, to the body, and to the fragile hoop of life that holds us all. Links: Website: www.katewalters.co.uk Instagram: @KateWaltersArtist Therapeutic Landscapes Website

  3. Aug 3

    Dreams Made Visible: Agni Kapuscinska on Live Art, Nature and the Language of the Soul

    In this episode, Rebecca speaks with Agni Kapuscinska, a live art performance artist whose work moves between performance, video, photography, ritual, dream, landscape, and visual poetry. The conversation focuses on Agni’s project My Soul Speaks Through My Dreams, a body of work created through live performance, photographic images, and video, with performances taking place outdoors in the Peloponnese in Greece. Agni reflects on how particular places, especially the landscapes of the Peloponnese, became central to the work, inviting her into deeper listening, meditation, observation, and connection with the spirit of the land. Together, Rebecca and Agni explore dreams as a language of the soul, the influence of Jung’s Red Book, and the way images, symbols, bones, found objects, and natural materials can become part of a creative and spiritual practice. Agni also speaks about her long relationship with bones in performance, including her bone dress, spine imagery, the tree of life, ancestors, death as transformation, and the powerful symbolic role of the spine as a bridge between earth, body, and spirit. The episode also covers Agni’s interest in the story of Saint Theodora of Vasta, whose body, according to legend, became a river, trees, and a temple, opening another thread around sacrifice, sanctity, embodiment, and becoming landscape. This is a conversation about art as a way of listening: to dreams, to place, to the body, to symbols, to ancestors, and to the deeper life moving beneath the visible world. Links: Website: www.agnikapustinska.com Instagram: @adlivingarts Tree of Life Image Therapeutic Landscapes: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org

  4. Jul 27

    Threading Ancestral Knowledge: Becky Dodman Wainwright on Chumbe Weaving, Colombian Heritage and Ethical Research

    In this episode, Rebecca speaks with Becky Dodman Wainwright, Postgraduate Course Leader for Arts University Plymouth (AUP) and textile researcher/artist, whose work explores ethical research methods, Colombian heritage crafts, and the repair of lost mixed-heritage connections. Together, they discuss Becky’s personal and creative journey into Colombian textile heritage, including how questions of colour, ancestry, family history, and Indigenous Colombian identity led her towards the study of chumbe weaving and the symbolic knowledge held within woven belts. Becky reflects on the importance of approaching heritage craft through care, reciprocity, relationship, and consent, especially when working with Indigenous communities, land-based knowledge, and ancestral practices. The conversation explores what ethical research can look like when it moves beyond individual consent and begins to consider community permission, land permission, active listening, and long-term relationship building. The episode also explores textile practice as embodied knowledge, the role of pictograms and woven symbols as forms of cultural memory, and the need to keep context wrapped around the objects we study, make, exhibit, and teach. This is a conversation about textiles as living archives, ancestral reconnection, community knowledge transfer, decolonial research practice, and the power of making with care. Links: Website: www.beckydodman.work Instagram: @becky.dodman.wainwright Therapeutic Landscapes: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org

  5. Jul 23

    Fiction as a Therapeutic Device: Simon O’Sullivan on Landscape, Ritual and The Ancient Device

    In this episode, John Cussans speaks with Simon O’Sullivan, philosopher, artist, writer, and member of the performance group Plastique Fantastique, about his 2024 fiction The Ancient Device, published by Triarchy Press. The conversation explores how fiction, ritual, performance, landscape, and therapeutic practice come together in Simon’s work. They discuss the book’s journey through English ceremonial landscapes, mummers’ plays, rave and traveller culture, wounded characters, internal worlds, and the possibility of using fiction as a kind of device or prop for transformation. Simon reflects on the relationship between The Ancient Device and Plastique Fantastique, the influence of folk culture, adolescent landscapes, village greens, village halls, performance, masks, and the deep mythic charge of places that stay with us across a lifetime. The episode also moves into group work, trauma, addiction, anxiety, intentional communities, therapeutic performance, and the relationship between external landscapes and internal psychic landscapes. This is a conversation about how stories, rituals, props, masks, performances, and places can help us encounter what has been hidden, wounded, or unresolved, and how fiction might become a living method for repair, recognition, and re-enchantment. Links: Simon O’Sullivan: www.simonosullivan.net Plastique Fantastique: www.plastiquefantastique.org The Ancient Device: available from Triarchy Press Therapeutic Landscapes: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org

  6. Jul 20

    Making the Museum Feel Alive: Emalee Beddoes on Folk Art, Rural Craft and Cultural Stewardship

    In this episode, Rebecca speaks with Emalee Beddoes, Curator of Collections & Engagement at Herefordshire Museums & Galleries, about museums, folk art, rural craft, co-production, and the process of reimagining historic collections for contemporary communities. Emalee shares what it means to work as a curator of both collections and engagement, and how her role moves between research, object care, public programming, community work, craft activities, artists, volunteers, and the development of a new gallery for Hereford Museum and Art Gallery, which is currently in redevelopment. The conversation explores Herefordshire’s rich craft and folk art collections, including straw craft, smocks, miniature jugs, gingerbread moulds, Alfred Watkins, ley lines, rural making, local fairs, and the deep creativity embedded in ordinary and working-class cultural forms. Rebecca and Emalee also discuss how museums might move beyond presenting finished objects and instead invite people into the process, feeling, making, memory, and relationship behind them. Emalee reflects on ideas of flow, collective effervescence, cultural stewardship, participatory making, rural arts ecologies, and the importance of creating museum spaces that feel welcoming, playful, accessible, and alive. The episode also touches on Emalee’s previous work on Common Ground at The Wilson, co-production with artists and communities, the role of heritage crafts, and how museums can hold space for both care and curiosity. This is a conversation about how museums can become places of connection rather than distance, where collections are not just preserved behind glass, but opened up as invitations into making, belonging, humour, place, and shared cultural life. Links: Instagram: @emaleebeddoes Herefordshire Museums & Galleries: @herefordshiremuseums Therapeutic Landscapes: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org

  7. Jul 14

    Beyond The Wicker Man Effect: Sophie Parkes-Nield on Calendar Customs, Folklore and Fiction

    In this episode of the Therapeutic Landscapes podcast, Rebecca speaks with Sophie Parkes-Nield, writer, researcher, and folklorist, whose work explores how calendar customs and intangible cultural heritage are represented in contemporary fiction. The conversation begins with Sophie’s practice-based PhD research, which she is now developing into a monograph for University of Exeter Press. Her work asks why writers are so often drawn to folkloric material, what calendar customs do within fiction, and how rituals, processions, seasonal gatherings, and local traditions can shape character, plot, place, time, and belonging. One of the central ideas in the episode is what Sophie describes as “The Wicker Man effect”, the tendency to frame calendar customs as eerie, insular, sinister, or strange. While folk horror has created a rich and compelling visual language around ritual and tradition, Sophie invites us to look more closely at what these customs mean to the people and communities who keep them alive. For many people, calendar customs are ways of marking time, remembering place, gathering community, honouring continuity, and locating oneself within a longer story. They may be joyful, odd, beautiful, contentious, moving, inconvenient, funny, or deeply meaningful, and often they are several of these things at once. Rebecca and Sophie discuss Morris dancing, processions, Padstow May Day, the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, the Whittlesea Straw Bear, invented customs in fiction, and the ethics of writing with folklore. The conversation's central question is: how can writers approach living traditions with imagination and sensitivity, without treating them as decorative atmosphere or easy shorthand for danger? Sophie also shares about her work with the National Folklore Survey, a project exploring folkloric belief and custom in England today, from ghosts and magpies to Halloween, Bonfire Night, and the rituals people continue to carry in everyday life. This is a conversation about folklore as lived experience, calendar customs as forms of belonging, and fiction as a place where tradition, memory, community, and imagination can meet. Find out more about Sophie’s work: www.sophieparkes.co.uk www.nationalfolkloresurvey.co.uk Instagram: @sophieparkeswriter Find out more about Therapeutic Landscapes: https://www.therapeutic-landscapes.org/

  8. Jul 1

    Vision, Ritual and Legacy: Dr Su Fahy on Feminist Archives and Forgotten Women Artists

    In this episode, Rebecca Burns speaks with Dr Su Fahy, artist and curator, whose work explores ritual, vision, dream, archives, legacy artists, and the dialogue between historical and contemporary creative practice. Together, they discuss Su’s current project, The String of Pearls, which is unfolding across the UK and seeks to reprise the reputation of women artists who have been written out of the art historical canon. Working in association with Feminist Archive South and University of Bristol Special Collections, the project traces the lives, works, letters, paintings, rituals, and creative networks of women artists connected to Monica Sjöö and the radical feminist, visionary, and goddess-centred art movements of the 1970s. The conversation explores DIY exhibition-making, feminist manifestos, sacred sites, matriarchal landscapes, spiral symbolism, pilgrimage, goddess culture, and the importance of treating archives as living spaces of care rather than static repositories of the past. Su also reflects on bringing Jill Smith’s Spiral Ritual into contemporary spaces, including Therapeutic Landscapes, and the power of ritual to create reverence and embodied connection within an exhibition or gathering. About: Dr. Su Fahy's work focuses on ritual, vision & dream within legacy artists work in archives and linking their work to contemporary artists through text and image documents and lens-based media. Links: Monica Sjöö Curatorial: www.monicasjoocuratorial.com Instagram Projects: @monica_sjoo Instagram: @memoryartpalace Therapeutic Landscapes: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org

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Bringing together researchers, practitioners, and thinkers exploring the intersections of place, culture, and health. From ancient folk traditions to contemporary therapeutic practice, these conversations ask what landscapes, physical, imagined, and remembered, do for us.

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