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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/

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

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.

Bio:

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.

Links:

Website: seedsistas.co.uk

Instagram: @seed_sistas

Herbal First Aid E-guide: Access here

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

Want to join us, get all the details here: https://www.therapeutic-landscapes.org/events

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

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.