Therapeutic Landscapes: Ritual, Folklore, and Wellbeing

In this episode, Rebecca Burns speaks with Jenny Carden, a Medical Herbalist, Moorland Guide, Archivist and Archaeobotanist whose work brings together herbal medicine, archaeology, landscape and our relationship with the natural world.

Jenny shares how her own experience of chronic illness led her back outdoors, initially through looking for fungi and gradually through plants, herbal medicine and Dartmoor. She reflects on how moving slowly and looking closely offered a different way of being outside, where success was not measured by distance, speed or physical achievement.

The conversation explores archaeobotany and what ancient plant remains can reveal about how people used plants for food, medicine and care. Jenny discusses some of the archaeological discoveries that have stayed with her, and why bringing herbal knowledge into conversation with scientific and archaeological approaches can help us ask new questions about the past.

Jenny also explores the barriers that people living with chronic pain, fatigue and invisible illness can face when trying to spend time outdoors. From unpredictable energy levels and worries about keeping up with a group to the fear of being alone when your body feels unreliable, Jenny highlights how easily conventional ideas of outdoor recreation can exclude people.

Jenny discusses what a more accessible relationship with nature might look like: noticing mushrooms, learning one plant, exploring a hedgerow, sitting beneath a tree, walking somewhere with a level path, or choosing a woodland where the car remains close by.

Jenny also traces some of the history of herbal medicine, class and access to healthcare, from Nicholas Culpeper and working-class botanical medicine clubs to wider questions about whose knowledge is recognised and who has access to the landscapes that support health and wellbeing.

The conversation takes in Dartmoor, wild foods, preventative herbalism, Jenny’s Herbal Foundations course, overlooked plantation forests, map reading, social class, access to green space, and the pressure many of us feel to make even our leisure time productive.

Running throughout the episode is the idea of permission: permission to go slowly, to begin small, to engage with plants and landscapes in ways that suit your own body and circumstances, and to let your relationship with the outdoors look different from the version we are so often shown.

This is a conversation about finding your own way into relationship with the living world, one that feels safe, accessible, curious and genuinely supportive.

Links:

Instagram: @dartmoorherbalist

Website: dartmoorherbalist.co.uk

Therapeutic Landscapes: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org

In this episode, we hear a presentation by Dr Bettina Borg Cardona on music, dance and holistic healing at the ancient Greek sanctuary of Epidaurus (You can watch the presentation here).

Bettina explores Epidaurus as one of the most famous therapeutic landscapes of the ancient world: a place of pilgrimage, sacred ritual, dream incubation, natural beauty and divine healing, where people travelled to seek the aid of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine and healing.

The presentation looks at how healing at Epidaurus took place within a landscape that was both sacred and natural, surrounded by mountains, temples, altars, water, trees, ritual spaces and the elemental forces of earth, fire, water and air.

A central focus of the episode is the importance of music and dance within the sanctuary. Bettina discusses the role of Apollo, god of music and medicine, and explores the paean, a circular song-dance associated with healing, relief, renewal and deliverance from pain or adversity.

Drawing on ancient Greek ideas of harmony, proportion, the cosmos, sacred centres and ritual movement, the presentation considers how music was understood not only as sound, but as a way of aligning human life with divine, natural and cosmic order.

Bettina also reflects on dream incubation, purification, sacrifice, sacred water, Pythagorean ideas of musical harmony, Eliade’s understanding of ritual and sacred time, and the possibility that healing involved a reorientation of the patient within a larger pattern of relationship and renewal.

The episode closes with the figure of Eros, understood as a cosmic force of relationship between the things of the world. Through this lens, healing becomes a process of coming back into relationship with the whole.

This is a presentation about listening to the landscape, dancing the cosmos, and imagining healing as a return to harmony: with nature, with the sacred, with the body, with the psyche, and with the wider pattern of life.

Links:

Watch the Presentation: https://www.therapeutic-landscapes.org/the-podcast/episode-16-the-music-of-eros

Therapeutic Landscapes: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org

In this episode, Rebecca Burns speaks to Maria Laguna, who works with immigrant clients in private practice and teaches about migration issues from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Maria’s work is deeply informed by Donald Winnicott, especially his ideas around transitional spaces, play, creativity, culture, and the relationship between the inner world and the external environment.

The conversation explores diasporic placemaking, and how migrant communities create spaces of belonging while navigating the experience of feeling neither fully here nor there. Maria discusses examples from New York, Los Angeles, Montevideo and Rome, including community gardens, Little Tokyo, Candombe in Barrio Sur, and Las Leonas, a documentary about migrant women playing football on the outskirts of Rome.

Maria discusses the emotional and cultural complexity of migration, including belonging, cultural mourning, language, food, music, memory, intergenerational transmission, safety, activism, and the ways migrant communities transform the places they arrive in while also being transformed by them.

The episode also explores how familiar objects, rituals, colours, songs, meals, gardens, dances and communal practices can act like transitional objects: carrying something of home into an unfamiliar world, and helping people feel held, recognised and rehumanised.

Maria also reflects on the role of therapy, social justice and community work in supporting migrants, and how therapists might pay closer attention to the physical, cultural and political environments their patients are living within.

This is a conversation about home as something relational and creative: something made through people, places, shared practices, memories, play, and the spaces where we are allowed to feel safe enough to become ourselves.

Links:

Instagram: @mariaverolaguna and @migrantes UY

Conference Panel: Diasporic Placemaking as Healing and Resistance

Website: www.psychoanalysisandsocialjustice.com

Therapeutic Landscapes: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org

In this episode, Rebecca Burns speaks with Katie GoddenGreen, an artist whose practice explores storytelling, rural memory and seasonal rhythms through clay, woodcut, textiles and material-led making.

Katie’s research asks: How can mythopoetic art practices rooted in rural communities create new forms of cultural memory and belonging within a changing ecological landscape?

The conversation focuses on The Parish of Milk, Katie’s imagined and non-imagined Cornish domain where beasts, plants, feasts, women, stories, fields, farming histories, folklore and seasonal rituals are gathered together through art. Katie describes the Parish of Milk as both a real place and a magical world: a hidden valley, a maternal landscape, a place of milk, making, joy, memory and belonging.

Katie discusses Sew Sew, the weekly sewing group that began around Katie’s kitchen table and has grown into a living community of women making together. Through stitching, linen, pockets, patchwork, rosettes, bunting, bells, frolicsome frocks and seasonal projects, the group has become a place of friendship, confidence, creativity and local connection.

The episode explores Katie’s interest in keeping rural histories alive, from Cornish farming field names, cows’ names, old sayings and agricultural rhythms, to the knowledge of trees, leaves, birds, plants and seasonal change. Katie reflects on the importance of reconnecting people, especially younger generations, with the living nature around them, and the possibility that renewed attention to the more-than-human world might create greater care for the future.

Katie also discusses the magic and myth of making, including her ceramic babushkas, dedushkas, Baba Yaga figures, mythic guardians, dresses, hats, fooling, misrule, masks, performance, and the joy of becoming someone slightly different through costume and ritual.

This is a conversation about rural creativity as a form of belonging: how gathering around fabric, clay, song, story, food, animals, and seasonal change can help communities remember who they are, imagine who they might become, and keep the kettle boiling for the future.

Links:

Website: katiegoddengreen.com

Instagram: @katiegoddengreen

Therapeutic Landscapes: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org

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

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

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

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

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

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