AMY HALE
![]()
Feminist Ecologies and Emergent Magics in Contemporary Art
One way of conceiving of magic is that it is centrally concerned with cultivating relationships with spaces and entities, to help navigate agency in a vast and complex universe. For many practitioners, magic is affectively and aesthetically entwined with notions of tradition, transmission and a connection with premodern practice. Yet the frameworks for understanding magical practice have always had an emergent quality which is responsive to science, technology and changing models of reality. Magical paradigms also adapt to global events, seen in the emergence of Rosicrucianism at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Chaos Magic in the late 1970s, and modern ecofeminisms from the 1980s onward. Today, some models of magical practice explicitly reflect resistance to systemic oppression of human, and other than human entities, and climate change, seeing these as inherently connected phenomena. Emergent magical discourses informed by feminist theorists, writers, and New Materialist thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler and Karen Barad, promote a radically connected, complex universe defined by quantum entanglement, suggesting that our individuality is somewhat an illusion. As a result, the hierarchical models of magic which derived from Neoplatonism are shifting toward models conceived as horizontal networks where all beings, including other than human and those potentially non-incarnate, are connected and enmeshed, where time and space are fluid, and care and reciprocity are explicitly valued.
This presentation explores the work of several contemporary women and LGBTQ artists who are disrupting and “troubling” earlier magical paradigms, creating new processes and magical aesthetics incorporating feminist ecologies which acknowledge a universe that extends beyond the visible. The work of Tai Shani, Alice Bucknell, Bones Tan Jones, Saya Woolfalk and others reflect a worldview of complex connections and bold visions for relating with a variety of entities. They engage with responsive and feminist magically informed practices including ritual, visual storytelling and worldbuilding, promoting change and transformation, reconfiguring our relationships and responsibilities to the other than human, both seen and unseen.
Bio
Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer and critic. Research interests include magic, art, culture, women and Cornwall. Recent books include Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, Sex Magic: Diagrams of Love, and Essays on Women in Western Esotericism (ed). A Walking Flame: Selected Magical Essays of Ithell Colquhoun is due in early 2025 and her current projects include a global survey of magic in contemporary art. She has contributed essays for Tate, Burlington Contemporary, Art UK, Arusha Gallery and Correspondences Journal. She is an Honorary Research Fellow with Falmouth University, a trustee of Rediscovering Art by Women (RAW) and a member of the British Art Network.
ANDY SHARP
![]()
Invasion of the Energy Spectres
In this talk, I look at the ufological turn in occultism spearheaded by the occultist Kenneth Grant. Critical to understanding this turn, but less well studied than Grant's Typhonian Trilogies, is his novella, Against the Light. Though ostensibly a work of fiction, Against the Light is replete with tangible terrestrial locations and actual sites of supposed ingress. I will explore some of these sites, particularly in Suffolk, and their significance in understanding the palimpsest of initiation and ufologicks that weaves through Grant's work, a lineage immediately traceable to Arthur Machen's meld of Celtic folklore and cosmic horror. Touched upon in Against the Light and further developed in his non-fiction work, The Outer Gateways, Grant expounded the idea that contactees were receiving warnings about our planet, post-Hiroshima. As such, we can construe this aspect of his work as a form of occult ecology on a cosmic scale, and we will discuss the development of his thinking in this area. I will also briefly review the contemporaneous work of Maggie Ingalls and Allen Holub during the 1970s and their adjacency to Grant's explorations. The talk will then explore the influence of Tantra and Buddhism on Grant's extraterrestrial concerns. Finally, we will look at the connection between Grant's void, established through this coopting of Eastern religion, and the cosmic nihilism of Thomas Ligotti. How might we embrace this void or heed its warning, and how can our work feed into a lineage of writers and visionary artists that is both folkloric and cautionary?
The Underworld Service
The Underworld Service is a musical project celebrating syncretism through electronic hymns and sermons. For this performance, we will perform two hymns to the outer reaches of occultism. This performance will complement and expand on the ideas of the talk, demonstrating a creative implementation of ultraterrestrial electronics. In the first hymn, we will invoke the imagined cult of Ixaxar, first realised in the fiction of Arthur Machen and later coded into the outré mythos of Kenneth Grant as one of his many touchstones for traffic with alien entities. In the final piece, we will soundtrack the work of Maggie Ingalls and Allen Holub, cohorts of Grant, who, in the mid-1970s, achieved rapport with transhuman entities known as the Forgotten Ones.
Bio
Andy Sharp is a multimedia artist and writer. For many years, he ran English Heretic, a creative research project that subverted heritage history to explore an esoteric rendering of England. The project released over a dozen records and magazines, anthologised by Repeater Books in 2020 as The English Heretic Collection. Since then, he has written a study of magic through the lens of geography called The Astral Geographic, published by Watkins Wisdom in 2023. He continues to talk on a wide range of esoteric and cultural subjects and to develop music under the moniker The Underworld Service as an application of his magical research. He has an MSc in Neuroscience and lives in London.
CAVAN MCLAUGHLIN
![]()
The Art of Response-Able Collaborative Survival with Other-Than-Humans
This presentation will present some of the conclusions of the recently completed practice-based PhD, Occultural Production as Re-vision and Weird Worlding (McLaughlin, 2024). The study undertook an autoethnographic and post-textual analysis of occultural practices, providing a comprehensive exploration of the concept of occulture in both theory and practice.
By integrating practice-based methodologies with theoretical analysis, the study not only advances the discourse on occultural theory but also establishes a framework for future practical investigations within occulture and an emergent field of occultural studies. Through a transdisciplinary lens, the research explores the complex relationships between the art and science of occulture, activism, and (oc)cultural resistance. Furthermore, it highlights the transformative potential of ecologically concerned esoteric art and occultural production as forms of emancipatory worlding and response-able collaborative survival with other-than-humans. Tsing (2015) argues collaborative survival is the necessity of cooperation across different interdependent species within broader ecosystems that facilitate the transformative encounters that reshape their participants. Occulture and occultural studies extend these efforts into other-than-human collaborations within and, crucially, beyond the bios to include all manner of esoteric and seemingly alienated agencies that co-create and co-constitute our wordings.
This presentation will examine these various intersections and advocate for an extension of the cultural studies agenda to address the ecological and ethical concerns surrounding encounters, collaborations, and intra-actions with a radical array of other-than-humans.
Bio
Cavan McLaughlin is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England (UWE), with research interests the study of occulture. Editor of the volume Trans- States: The Art of Crossing Over (2019), Cavan is also an artist with over twenty years in creative media practice. Cavan is the founder and Chair of Trans- States (trans-states.org); co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Monad: Journal of Transformative Practice (monadjournal.com); a trustee of the Research Network for the Study of Esoteric Practices (www.rensep.org); and, Vice-Chair of the South-West Association for the Study of Esotericism (SWASE). Cavan has a profound affection for cows, fungi, and rainbows.
CHARLOTTE RODGERS
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Animism, Memory and Art as Magic: Empathy, Articulation and Effect
In this presentation artist, author and magical practitioner Charlotte Rodgers proposes to build on her earlier ideas of spiritual DNA being represented by a double helix of art and magic in a constant process of catalysing each other, and explore the bridge that links these interacting strands; animism. Her belief being that the animism is not that everything holds a lifeforce but rather, an inherent memory; memory that strives to be acknowledged, articulated and expressed. Working creatively with animism articulated as memory has the potential to precipitate a transformative magical and creative process whilst generating a greater empathy for wider expressions of existence. By peeling back of layers of personal magical and creative experiences of art and her often intuitive work dancing with the animist current, Charlotte will show how the process leads to insight into both inner and outer realms, including events such as the pandemic with its brief rearranging of human relations with nature and the ramifications of items belong to those who suffered and died alone at that time, being discarded. She will consider how working with concepts of animism as encapsulated in memory can smash through conventions of gender, considered value attributed to some species over others and definitions of god forms. paving possible paths for wider understandings that are necessary for us to move forward; also acknowledging the need for empathy and compassion in order to experience and work with wider permutations of realities.
Bio
Charlotte Rodgers is an artist and author who is also an animist and nondenominational practising witch and magician. She conceived and co-edited A Contemporary Western Book of the Dead and wrote The Bloody Sacrifice and P is for Prostitution, all published by Mandrake of Oxford. Her work is published in magazines including The Cauldron, The Oracle and SilkMilk, FOLKWITCH, and The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies as well as in anthologies published by Avalonia, Scarlet Imprint and Fenris Wolf. She had given talks at Edinburgh and York Universities, The Museum of Morbid Anatomy in New York and many conferences and events, most recently being Artist in residence at The Magickal Women Conference in Birmingham. In 2017 she was awarded an a-n arts Council grant to spend ten days investigating and blogging about the New York art world and a filmed exhibition of her work was made for CRASSH (Cambridge University Centre of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) Magic and Ecology Symposium 2021-2022.
DAISY KREBS
![]()
Borrowed Verticality
In this presentation, we are going to look at vines or climbing plants and their specific adaptive evolutionary strategies. Vines share their symbolism with the spiral, an optimistic evolutive force. In many traditions they represent the primordial link between Cosmos and Earth. Many vines are linked to altered states of consciousness : grapevine, ivy, hop, betel, Banisteriopsis caapi, …
Adopting a phytocentric perspective, we will embark on the journey of growth of climbing plants from their horizontal state in the shadow of the ground, to their encounter with a vertical element, and their growth until they reach the canopy, deploy their leaves and photosynthesise. We will look more closely into the tendril strategy, a haptic way of exploring, using a specialised organ for support and attachment, from circumnutation to coiling.
Externalising rigidity and verticality to other plants or structures is a common occurrence in the vegetal kingdom, and has many benefits. What can we learn from this evolutionary strategy? A true initiation to viriditas, the force of being green, and to plant metamorphosis, from horizontal to vertical and from the shadow of the ground to light as a source of energy.
Bio
Daisy Krebs is an artist working and living between Paris and London. They studied art at Goldsmiths University, landscape architecture at Edinburgh College of Art and horticulture in Paris. Their work is often concerned with space and genius loci, especially in the context of site-specific installations of different scales. Krebs often works in collaboration with friend entities, plants-as-kin, in a co-creative dynamic. Their work has been shown in Gaité Lyrique (2024, Paris), Triennale Art & Industry (2023, Dunkirk), Sherbet Green (2023, London), IMT Gallery (2023, London), Chisenhale studios (2022, London), Martell residency (2021, France).
Feminist Ecologies and Emergent Magics in Contemporary Art
One way of conceiving of magic is that it is centrally concerned with cultivating relationships with spaces and entities, to help navigate agency in a vast and complex universe. For many practitioners, magic is affectively and aesthetically entwined with notions of tradition, transmission and a connection with premodern practice. Yet the frameworks for understanding magical practice have always had an emergent quality which is responsive to science, technology and changing models of reality. Magical paradigms also adapt to global events, seen in the emergence of Rosicrucianism at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Chaos Magic in the late 1970s, and modern ecofeminisms from the 1980s onward. Today, some models of magical practice explicitly reflect resistance to systemic oppression of human, and other than human entities, and climate change, seeing these as inherently connected phenomena. Emergent magical discourses informed by feminist theorists, writers, and New Materialist thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler and Karen Barad, promote a radically connected, complex universe defined by quantum entanglement, suggesting that our individuality is somewhat an illusion. As a result, the hierarchical models of magic which derived from Neoplatonism are shifting toward models conceived as horizontal networks where all beings, including other than human and those potentially non-incarnate, are connected and enmeshed, where time and space are fluid, and care and reciprocity are explicitly valued.
This presentation explores the work of several contemporary women and LGBTQ artists who are disrupting and “troubling” earlier magical paradigms, creating new processes and magical aesthetics incorporating feminist ecologies which acknowledge a universe that extends beyond the visible. The work of Tai Shani, Alice Bucknell, Bones Tan Jones, Saya Woolfalk and others reflect a worldview of complex connections and bold visions for relating with a variety of entities. They engage with responsive and feminist magically informed practices including ritual, visual storytelling and worldbuilding, promoting change and transformation, reconfiguring our relationships and responsibilities to the other than human, both seen and unseen.
Bio
Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer and critic. Research interests include magic, art, culture, women and Cornwall. Recent books include Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, Sex Magic: Diagrams of Love, and Essays on Women in Western Esotericism (ed). A Walking Flame: Selected Magical Essays of Ithell Colquhoun is due in early 2025 and her current projects include a global survey of magic in contemporary art. She has contributed essays for Tate, Burlington Contemporary, Art UK, Arusha Gallery and Correspondences Journal. She is an Honorary Research Fellow with Falmouth University, a trustee of Rediscovering Art by Women (RAW) and a member of the British Art Network.
ANDY SHARP
Invasion of the Energy Spectres
In this talk, I look at the ufological turn in occultism spearheaded by the occultist Kenneth Grant. Critical to understanding this turn, but less well studied than Grant's Typhonian Trilogies, is his novella, Against the Light. Though ostensibly a work of fiction, Against the Light is replete with tangible terrestrial locations and actual sites of supposed ingress. I will explore some of these sites, particularly in Suffolk, and their significance in understanding the palimpsest of initiation and ufologicks that weaves through Grant's work, a lineage immediately traceable to Arthur Machen's meld of Celtic folklore and cosmic horror. Touched upon in Against the Light and further developed in his non-fiction work, The Outer Gateways, Grant expounded the idea that contactees were receiving warnings about our planet, post-Hiroshima. As such, we can construe this aspect of his work as a form of occult ecology on a cosmic scale, and we will discuss the development of his thinking in this area. I will also briefly review the contemporaneous work of Maggie Ingalls and Allen Holub during the 1970s and their adjacency to Grant's explorations. The talk will then explore the influence of Tantra and Buddhism on Grant's extraterrestrial concerns. Finally, we will look at the connection between Grant's void, established through this coopting of Eastern religion, and the cosmic nihilism of Thomas Ligotti. How might we embrace this void or heed its warning, and how can our work feed into a lineage of writers and visionary artists that is both folkloric and cautionary?
The Underworld Service
The Underworld Service is a musical project celebrating syncretism through electronic hymns and sermons. For this performance, we will perform two hymns to the outer reaches of occultism. This performance will complement and expand on the ideas of the talk, demonstrating a creative implementation of ultraterrestrial electronics. In the first hymn, we will invoke the imagined cult of Ixaxar, first realised in the fiction of Arthur Machen and later coded into the outré mythos of Kenneth Grant as one of his many touchstones for traffic with alien entities. In the final piece, we will soundtrack the work of Maggie Ingalls and Allen Holub, cohorts of Grant, who, in the mid-1970s, achieved rapport with transhuman entities known as the Forgotten Ones.
Bio
Andy Sharp is a multimedia artist and writer. For many years, he ran English Heretic, a creative research project that subverted heritage history to explore an esoteric rendering of England. The project released over a dozen records and magazines, anthologised by Repeater Books in 2020 as The English Heretic Collection. Since then, he has written a study of magic through the lens of geography called The Astral Geographic, published by Watkins Wisdom in 2023. He continues to talk on a wide range of esoteric and cultural subjects and to develop music under the moniker The Underworld Service as an application of his magical research. He has an MSc in Neuroscience and lives in London.
CAVAN MCLAUGHLIN
The Art of Response-Able Collaborative Survival with Other-Than-Humans
This presentation will present some of the conclusions of the recently completed practice-based PhD, Occultural Production as Re-vision and Weird Worlding (McLaughlin, 2024). The study undertook an autoethnographic and post-textual analysis of occultural practices, providing a comprehensive exploration of the concept of occulture in both theory and practice.
By integrating practice-based methodologies with theoretical analysis, the study not only advances the discourse on occultural theory but also establishes a framework for future practical investigations within occulture and an emergent field of occultural studies. Through a transdisciplinary lens, the research explores the complex relationships between the art and science of occulture, activism, and (oc)cultural resistance. Furthermore, it highlights the transformative potential of ecologically concerned esoteric art and occultural production as forms of emancipatory worlding and response-able collaborative survival with other-than-humans. Tsing (2015) argues collaborative survival is the necessity of cooperation across different interdependent species within broader ecosystems that facilitate the transformative encounters that reshape their participants. Occulture and occultural studies extend these efforts into other-than-human collaborations within and, crucially, beyond the bios to include all manner of esoteric and seemingly alienated agencies that co-create and co-constitute our wordings.
This presentation will examine these various intersections and advocate for an extension of the cultural studies agenda to address the ecological and ethical concerns surrounding encounters, collaborations, and intra-actions with a radical array of other-than-humans.
Bio
Cavan McLaughlin is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England (UWE), with research interests the study of occulture. Editor of the volume Trans- States: The Art of Crossing Over (2019), Cavan is also an artist with over twenty years in creative media practice. Cavan is the founder and Chair of Trans- States (trans-states.org); co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Monad: Journal of Transformative Practice (monadjournal.com); a trustee of the Research Network for the Study of Esoteric Practices (www.rensep.org); and, Vice-Chair of the South-West Association for the Study of Esotericism (SWASE). Cavan has a profound affection for cows, fungi, and rainbows.
CHARLOTTE RODGERS
Animism, Memory and Art as Magic: Empathy, Articulation and Effect
In this presentation artist, author and magical practitioner Charlotte Rodgers proposes to build on her earlier ideas of spiritual DNA being represented by a double helix of art and magic in a constant process of catalysing each other, and explore the bridge that links these interacting strands; animism. Her belief being that the animism is not that everything holds a lifeforce but rather, an inherent memory; memory that strives to be acknowledged, articulated and expressed. Working creatively with animism articulated as memory has the potential to precipitate a transformative magical and creative process whilst generating a greater empathy for wider expressions of existence. By peeling back of layers of personal magical and creative experiences of art and her often intuitive work dancing with the animist current, Charlotte will show how the process leads to insight into both inner and outer realms, including events such as the pandemic with its brief rearranging of human relations with nature and the ramifications of items belong to those who suffered and died alone at that time, being discarded. She will consider how working with concepts of animism as encapsulated in memory can smash through conventions of gender, considered value attributed to some species over others and definitions of god forms. paving possible paths for wider understandings that are necessary for us to move forward; also acknowledging the need for empathy and compassion in order to experience and work with wider permutations of realities.
Bio
Charlotte Rodgers is an artist and author who is also an animist and nondenominational practising witch and magician. She conceived and co-edited A Contemporary Western Book of the Dead and wrote The Bloody Sacrifice and P is for Prostitution, all published by Mandrake of Oxford. Her work is published in magazines including The Cauldron, The Oracle and SilkMilk, FOLKWITCH, and The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies as well as in anthologies published by Avalonia, Scarlet Imprint and Fenris Wolf. She had given talks at Edinburgh and York Universities, The Museum of Morbid Anatomy in New York and many conferences and events, most recently being Artist in residence at The Magickal Women Conference in Birmingham. In 2017 she was awarded an a-n arts Council grant to spend ten days investigating and blogging about the New York art world and a filmed exhibition of her work was made for CRASSH (Cambridge University Centre of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) Magic and Ecology Symposium 2021-2022.
DAISY KREBS
Borrowed Verticality
In this presentation, we are going to look at vines or climbing plants and their specific adaptive evolutionary strategies. Vines share their symbolism with the spiral, an optimistic evolutive force. In many traditions they represent the primordial link between Cosmos and Earth. Many vines are linked to altered states of consciousness : grapevine, ivy, hop, betel, Banisteriopsis caapi, …
Adopting a phytocentric perspective, we will embark on the journey of growth of climbing plants from their horizontal state in the shadow of the ground, to their encounter with a vertical element, and their growth until they reach the canopy, deploy their leaves and photosynthesise. We will look more closely into the tendril strategy, a haptic way of exploring, using a specialised organ for support and attachment, from circumnutation to coiling.
Externalising rigidity and verticality to other plants or structures is a common occurrence in the vegetal kingdom, and has many benefits. What can we learn from this evolutionary strategy? A true initiation to viriditas, the force of being green, and to plant metamorphosis, from horizontal to vertical and from the shadow of the ground to light as a source of energy.
Bio
Daisy Krebs is an artist working and living between Paris and London. They studied art at Goldsmiths University, landscape architecture at Edinburgh College of Art and horticulture in Paris. Their work is often concerned with space and genius loci, especially in the context of site-specific installations of different scales. Krebs often works in collaboration with friend entities, plants-as-kin, in a co-creative dynamic. Their work has been shown in Gaité Lyrique (2024, Paris), Triennale Art & Industry (2023, Dunkirk), Sherbet Green (2023, London), IMT Gallery (2023, London), Chisenhale studios (2022, London), Martell residency (2021, France).