Therapeutic Landscapes: Ritual, Folklore, and Wellbeing

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

In this second episode, Dr John Cussans and Desdemona McCannon look back at what made Year One so powerful: the keynotes, the workshops, the singers and storytellers, and the overwhelming sense from everyone who attended that they had finally found their people.

They also look ahead. To a second year that's already shaping up to be bigger than the first, and to a longer vision of festivals, rural venues, and a network of practitioners, spaces and ideas that can keep nourishing each other long after the conference ends.

In this first episode, conference organisers Dr John Cussans and Desdemona McCannon share the story of how the Therapeutic Landscapes conference came to be. From an earlier symposium called Enchanted Environments, through their shared interests in folk culture, arts and health, and the healing power of place, to the moment the first call for papers went out, and the response was better than they could have imagined.