Toward the Living Light
A Response by Freya Yeates
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.
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, 2024Sculpture
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”.7 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.
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.
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