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Toward the Living Light 

A Response by Freya Yeates

                            Moon-White Water 2024 (detail)                                                                                                                                             Image credit: Freya Yaetes, 2024
                            Wall based glass sculpture, 47 x 40 x 0.7 cm
                            Float glass, mugwort sprigs, brambe shoots, S.t John’s wort flowers


“I burn, I shiver,” said Jinny, “out of this sun, into this shadow.”
~ Virginia Woolf 1


I begin my thoughts on Natasha Visona Moody’s exhibition, The Living Light of  Otherworlds, with a soliloquy taken from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves. Here, the sun  and the shadow are paired together, undulating, so to convey an experience of time that goes  beyond the self or the human. Like the peak and trough of a wave or the movement of a  breath, the sun rises, and the shadow falls. These intensities of the sun and the shadow (day to  night/birth to death/joy to sorrow) mark each season of our lives.

I burn, I shiver.

Much like Woolf’s Waves, Moody’s Living Light of Otherworlds is an embodied griefwork attuned to more-than-human worlds and the transformational intensities of the sun and the  shadow. Taking place from the 17th of October to the 1st of November, the exhibition bridges our transition from British Summertime to close on Samhain—the midpoint between the  Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice. This is a liminal time when the woods alchemise  from green to gold, a time, they say, when magic comes easy.2 Moody’s works can thus be  read as an offering, perhaps a guiding light, or a glimpse into an Otherworld, and another  way of seeing. Her work aids our transition through the thinning veil of Autumn.


Chemia, 2024                                                                                                                                                                                                             Image credit: Freya Yaetes, 2024
Steel, projection, copper sulphate solution, plaster, glass, amber, epoxy resin,
 woad, rowan berries, electroformed bluebells, brass cast bluebells, leaded glass


Out of this sun, into this shadow.

Here, shadow play, herbal wisdom, and Slavic Folklore—together with a relational  attunement to ecology and the Occult—underpin the exhibition. Moody’s expansive and  sensuous works (spanning the practice of photography, sculpture, and installation) are imbued  with her close attention to and transformation of both matter and meaning. Across the  collection of works, there is a sense of ongoing movement, or liveliness that demonstrates her practice as one which privileges materiality and process. This process of “conjuring and  healing,” as Moody insights, is an attempt to alchemise personal and ecological grief in correspondence with her ongoing research project into the suburban remanets of South  London’s ancient Great North (Ghost)Wood.


Dziewanna, Goddess of the Wilds, 2024                                                                                                                                                       Image credit: Joanna Wierzbicka, 2024
hanging sculpture, Verbascum densiflorum, acrylic ink, silver plated chain, thread



As Moody writes, situating the wood’s significance in London’s history of industrialisation,  ongoing expansion, and its submerged legacy—as a suburban Ghostwood—found within Southeast London’s place names and parks:

The Great North Wood was once an ancient woodland that grew along the steep  ridges of Southeast London, stretching northwards from Croydon to the
shores of the  Thames in Deptford. It was historically a working woodland, never designated as a  royal forest, a site of common land that had previously
survived felling by the  Romans and Anglo-Saxons. During the industrial era, its timber fuelled the expansion  of the ever-growing-still city of London. Trees became planks, became ships, became  beams, became houses, became wealth. Today the wood’s remnants are scattered  across the boroughs of Lewisham and Southwark. Found in parks, nature reserves and  on the edges of the train line, the wood is mostly encountered through local place  names: Brockley (badger’s wood), Penge (wood’s edge), Norwood, Forest Hill,  Gypsy Hill. 3


In ruins like these, strange grass cries, 2024                                                                                                                                                 Image credit: Joanna Wierzbicka, 2024
Sculpture
Leaded glass bramble cast, artist’s and artist’s mother’s hands cast in microcrystalline wax, scorched pine


On entering SEAGER Gallery, the sculpture “In ruins like these, strange grass cries”  welcomes me into the space. This sculpture is a pair of outstretched hands, moulded in wax  from casts of both the artist and her mother. These hands tenderly hold a glass branch of  bramble thorns. An offering evergreen and glowing, this otherworldly twig is a remnant of  the negative space left by the once-living plant—a proxy. As I move through the gallery, the  hum of an overhead projector (a feature of Moody’s “Chemia” sculptural installation)  envelopes the room, softening the sounds of rushing traffic passing by and through the adjacent “Ghostwood” of Deptford.

Moody’s Living Light offer a “proxy story”—a tactic of philosopher Astrida Neimanis’ posthuman feminist phenomenology—to effectively adjust a human-scaled awareness to  those experiences that are “latent, too quiet, or too vast [for our human bodies] to easily  grasp”.4 This practice focuses attunement on the ecologies we inhabit, using stories as a  helpful proxy, to amplify and extend our bodily awareness to that which we cannot  immediately see or sense.5 Proxy stories are, thus, not replacements for our embodied  experiences, “they are its amplifiers and sensitizers”.6

These sculptural casts of natural objects such as hands, brambles, leaves, and flowers— alongside an array of handmade herbal tinctures stored in ornate bottles—are the preservation  and transformation of what was once overlooked: a weed, some dirt, a petal, some berries, a fallen leaf. Yet, through her artistic practice, a process of clarification and extraction of an  object’s essence, Moody guides our attention to materially transform that which we might  have passed up on a stroll through the park (that which might otherwise be lost) into a sight  of beauty, healing, and magic. 

Moreover, for Moody, the practice of magic is the practice of close attunement to one’s  embodied experiences of the world. Magic, she says, “provides a lens through which to  consider that which exceeds the capacity to be understood. Rather, it must be felt. The Forest  fairy tale and alchemical practice are all sites within which external and internal (exoteric /  esoteric, macro / micro) transformations occur. That which is observable is also felt.”  Through this practice or process of attunement to Otherworlds, she asks us to look again and extend our imagination—following the so-called tagline of phenomenology—to “go back to  the things themselves”.It is this world, deeply felt and interconnected, that we must attune to  and re-orientate ourselves towards so as to see, feel, or imagine a world otherwise in the present.

 
Moon-White Water 2024 (detail)                                                                                                                                                               Image credit Joanna Wierzbicka, 2024
Wall based glass sculpture, 47 x 40 x 0.7 cm
Float glass, mugwort sprigs, brambe shoots, S.t John’s wort flowers


In “Moon-White Water,” for example, the stems, sprigs, and shoots of foraged herbs are placed between two panes of glass and then fired. An experiment, Moody tells me, from  which the result is transformative. In the heat of the kiln, the once solid glass glows amber,  melting like ice, the molten liquid bubbles. I look. I shiver, I burn. Between the glass, these  sprigs have turned to ash. The chemical reaction from such intense heat has caused the centre  of the glass pane to expand outward. A bloated belly marked with white lines, filled with  soot, carbon, from which we are all made. Moody thus returns her foraged finds to their very  chemical essence. To ash—we must go back to the things themselves. The stems, sprigs, and  shoots which once grew toward the sun, have become burned; have become shadows. I look  closely. I see dancers on the surface of the belly; they hold hands as they move. They look up, above them is the moon. I look again. I look closer. I see water. I see the white light  refracting—bouncing, dancing, blinding. I see the sun and the shadow, undulating. From each of these intensities, I move; I feel the Living Light of Otherworlds.

As Neimanis articulates, painting, writing, sculpture, installation, and other art forms grant us  access to otherwise submerged experiences of the world. We might find, perhaps, in a poetic  phrasing a feeling or an experience of the world that was once too distant, too abstract, or too  mundane to be readily sensed.8 The desire to draw on these stories, writes Neimanis, “does  not represent a failure of phenomenology to get ‘back to the things themselves’; it is rather an  affirmation that these stories, too, are pulled from a material world—but then, [similar to the chemical processes Moody embarks on in her alchemic artistic practice] are condensed,  concentrated, and given back to us such that we can more readily access and amplify them, anew”.9

He found one word, one only for the moon. Then he got up and went; we all got up;  we all went. But I, pausing, looked at the tree, and as I looked in autumn at the fiery  and yellow branches, some sediment formed; I formed; a drop fell; I fell–that is, from some completed experience I had emerged.10



Chemia, 2024 (detail)                                                                                                                                                                        Image credit: Natasha Viosna Moody , 2024 Steel, projection, copper sulphate solution, plaster, glass, amber, epoxy resin, rowan berries,
electroformed bluebells, brass cast bluebells, slides and leaded glass.


Ph(y)toform I                                                                                                                                                                                                           Image credit: Freya Yaetes, 2024
Giclée Free Fine Art - Studio Etching Rag, 220gsm, 40 x 60 cm



Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, The Waves, vol. 1 (Vintage Classics, 2016), 6.

2. Samhain (a Gaelic word pronounced “sow-win”) is a pagan religious festival originating from an ancient  Celtic spiritual tradition. It is usually celebrated from October 31 to November 1 to welcome in the harvest and  usher in “the dark half of the year.” Celebrants believe that the barriers between the physical world and the spirit  world break down during Samhain, allowing more interaction between humans and denizens of the Otherworld.

3. Natasha Viosna Moody, Ghosts of The Great North Wood: Alchemising Ecological Grief (2024)

4. Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 25. In  her landmark book Bodies of Water, Neimanis attends to water as a conduit that ethically implicates our bodies  within the waters and life of the planet. The primary aim of this work is to trouble a dominant approach to  bodies and water (formed by a Western metaphysical tradition) through a “posthuman feminist  phenomenology.” This builds on the embodied analysis of phenomenology (via Maurice Merleau-Ponty) as a  descriptive mode of attuning closely to lived experience, then, through the posthuman feminist scholarship (via  Stacy Alaimo and Rosi Braidotti), troubles the waters of European humanism’s understanding of embodiment.  Here, Neimanis moves beyond the corporeal stakes, or “borders,” of a human-centred and individual  subjectivity to consider experiences of “more-than-human” (animal, plant, meteorological, and technological)  bodies caught within the uneven flows of power, culture, and pollution. Her feminist figuration of oneself as  water is a mode to visualise other ways of being within environmental crises. For Neimanis, “we are not like  waters” but rather ethically entangled within them.

5. Neimanis, Bodies of Water, 55.

6. ibid.

7. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2001), xxiii.

8. ibid.

9. ibid.

10. Woolf, The Waves, 182.

Chemia, 2024 (details) 
Image credit: Natasha Viosna Moody, 2024



(C) Natasha Viosna Moody / 2024