Category Archives: inspiration

Ancient Landscapes

Ancient Landscapes is a partner project to Exploring with Stories and we thought you might enjoy the delights of a project bringing limestone to life


we’ve had a busy few days as the second phase of this project begins, or maybe as the tide runs again toward the full. (PIctures from the first phase can be found on my own Creeping Toad blog – I am Gordon MacLellan, is one of the workshop artists and disorganiser of a lot of the Stone and Water projects)


first session at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery

 

With Ancient Landscapes, we are looking at the limestone of the Peak District where we live and the fossils that rock contains. Then mixing observation, deduction and wild imagination, we work to create the original environments that spawned our limestone as installations in crochet, knitting, clay, beads, felt and anything else that takes our artists fancy!

 

 

building coral takes concentration.....


Coral takes tea and time as well as concentration



Meanwhile, a new group has taken up the challenge of extending the ancient landscape and a session at Buxton Museum last week, led on to a workshop at Fairfield Community Centre today. Five more sessions will follow and then we’ll see just how our coral garden grows before it unfolds its glories again in the Buxton Art Trail in the summer


 

not just coral, and while this lovely creature isn't quite period, she was too magnificent to ignore!


Inspiration

 

Our use of crochet in Ancient Landscapes was inspired by the global Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project (http://crochetcoralreef.org/) whose influence we acknowledge even though we couldn’t afford to sign into their network as a community group.


The connection between those techniques, other artforms and our Peak District landscapes comes from Stone and Water, a Buxton-based community group dedicated to celebrating the creativity of the people and landscapes of the Peaks.

 

new book: The Wanton Green

Over the last year, I have been one of a team editing a book that has now been released. The Wanton Green is an exciting collection of essays from (mostly) British pagans exploring their relations to places

 

cover image by Damian Hughes

From the main Press Release:

From the lost magics and holy waters of London to bleak Staffordshire Moorlands; from childhood adventures in Rochdale to faeries in Devon and Cumbria, a new book, The Wanton Green, offers readers a different perspective on landscape

 

As our relationship with the world unravels and needs to take new form, or maybe to reconnect with an older pattern, The Wanton Green presents a collection of inspiring, provoking and engaging essays by modern pagans talking about their own deep and passionate relationships with the Earth. With contributions from 20 authors that range from Druids to Heathens, from Chaos Magicians to Witches, Shamans and Voudou Mambo, Wanton Green brings voices from the diverse and growing Pagan community of Britain to the environmental debate and promises food for thought and inspiration for the spirit

 

Contributors include Emma Restall Orr, Runic John, Robert Wallsi, Jenny Blain, Melissa Harrington, Graham Harvey, Maria van Daalen, Susan Greenwood and Susan Cross

 

Ordering copies

a) direct from me £ 11.99 a copy, + £2.00 P&P for first copy and £1 per copy after that (cheques to Creeping Toad, or I can invoice you – address: 51-d West Rd, Buxton, SK17 6HQ

b) from Mandrake, the publishers

c) through a local bookshop or on-line store

 

Details

The Wanton Green:

contemporary pagan writings on place

editors: G MacLellan and S Cross

 

Mandrake Books, Oxford, 2011

ISBN: 978 1  906958 29 9

 

 

Chapters and sections include

Personal journeys, intimate connections

Fumbling in the landscape,             Runic John

Finding the space, finding the words, Rufus Harrington

Stone in my bones,                         Sarah Males

A Heathen in place: working with Mugwort, Robert Wallis

 

By river, well and sea

Wild, wild water,                                     Lou Hart

Facing the waves,                                     Gordon MacLellan

The dragon waters of place: a journey to the source, Susan Greenwood

 

Exploring – mud on your boots, mud on your hands

Catching the Rainbow Lizard,             Maria van Daalen

The rite to roam,                                     Julian Vayne

Places of Power                                     Jan Fries

Art is natural magic,                         Greg Humphries

 

Step back and consider

Pagan Ecology: on our perception of nature, ancestry and home, Emma Restall Orr

We have no imagination,             Susan Cross

Crossroads of perception,             Shani Oates

 

Where are the wild places

Devon, Faeries and Me,                         Woody Fox

Lud’s Church,                                     Gordon MacLellan

Places of spirit and spirits of place: of Fairy and other folk, and my Cumbrian bones.                                    Melissa Harrington

A life in the woods: protest site paganism, Adrian Harris

We first met in the north,             Barry Patterson

The king who sites upon the water, Barry Patterson

The Ballad of the Tyne Plover,             Barry Patterson

 

Urban wildness

Museum or Mausoleum – A Pagan at play in King Solomon’s House ,                                                             Mogg Morgan

Hills of the ancestors, townscapes of artisans, Jenny Blain

Smoke and mirrors,                         Stephen Grasso

America,                                                Maria van Daalen

Standing at the crossroads: A beginning at the end?

various authors