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

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/

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

In this episode, Rebecca speaks with Kaz and Fi from Seed Sistas, clinical herbalists and green witches whose work is rooted in reconnecting people with plants through science, story, sensory experience, and everyday herbal wisdom.

Together, they explore how Seed Sistas began, why so many people have become disconnected from the medicinal plants growing around them, and how herbs can support physical wellbeing, empowerment, imagination, ecological care, and a deeper sense of belonging in the living world.

Kaz and Fi share how theatre, costume, storytelling, folklore, and sensory experience became central to their teaching, helping people move beyond lists of herbal constituents and into a more embodied relationship with plants. They also discuss the creation of modern plant folklore, including their practice of inviting people to personify herbs, dream with them, and understand their medicine through story, character, and direct relationship.

The conversation also explores their Sensory Herbal Oracle Deck, a project that took nearly twenty years, and how the cards work as a teaching tool, guidance system, and invitation into plant connection. Through imagery, affirmation, reflection, and herbal knowledge, the deck offers a way for people to let the plants speak into their lives, health, emotions, and spiritual practice.

The Seed SistAs are clinical herbalists and green witches.

They bring forward the whole conversation between humans and plants, the science and the story, the molecule and the myth. To honour the goddess of healing alongside the clinical.

Website: seedsistas.co.uk

Instagram: @seed_sistas

Herbal First Aid E-guide: Access here

In this episode, Rebecca speaks with artist and researcher Sarah Bellisario, who will be joining Therapeutic Landscapes II: Ritual, Folklore and Wellbeing as part of the Magical Material Practice panel.

Sarah’s work explores how symbolic objects are used within magical, spiritual, faith-healing, and therapeutic practices, asking what these material encounters continue to offer us in relation to healing, recovery, connection, and meaning-making.

Together, Rebecca and Sarah discuss the development of The Humanist Deck, a magical, spiritual, and therapeutic art resource that grew out of Sarah’s fine art doctorate and her own creative healing practice. They explore how the deck has become a tool for conversation, reflection, art-making, and emotional recovery, with uses emerging across therapeutic, creative, NHS, and addiction recovery settings.

The conversation also explores Sarah’s Goddess Project, including her contemporary goddess sculptures, the public offerings and wishes left for them, and her developing idea for a collaboratively created tarot deck made by many people, for many people.

This conversation is about art as research, objects as containers of meaning, ritual as a holding space, and the power of making something tangible from personal and collective healing work.

Sarah will be speaking on Saturday 13th June in the Magical Material Practice panel, with her talk Holding Space for Recovery: Creative Engagement with Symbolic Artefacts and Ritual Making. She will also be running a workshop using The Humanist Deck.

Links:

Sarah Bellisario: www.sarahbellisario.com

The Humanist Deck: www.humannisdeck.com

Sarah's Instagram: @artandthecraft

Therapeutic Landscapes II: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org

Therapeutic Landscapes II is less than a month away, and in this episode, we take a look through the 2026 programme as the gathering begins to take shape.

The conference brings together artists, academics, practitioners, makers, performers, folklorists, researchers, and community workers exploring how place, story, ritual, creativity, memory, and embodied practice can support connection, care, and belonging.

The episode highlights some of the fantastic panels and themes across the two days, including Re-Enchanted Landscapes, Experimental Archaeologies, Frolic, Misrule, and Creative Chaos, Pilgrimage, Procession, Pageantry, Making Communities, Magical Material Practice, Plants and Places, Haunted Landscapes, Folk Artefacts and Cultural Commons, and Writing Ourselves into the Land.

The episode also celebrates the keynotes, workshops, performances, exhibition, and social gathering that will make the event feel less like a conventional conference and more like a meeting place for ideas, practices, people, and landscapes.

Therapeutic Landscapes II: Ritual, Folklore and Wellbeing takes place on Friday 12th and Saturday 13th June 2026.

View the full programme here:

https://www.therapeutic-landscapes.org/programme-2026