Encounters with the Underworld: Entering, transforming and the erotics of reaching back out to the world
What happens when symbols such as light, sunshine and ascension become so tied up with capitalist and patriarchal systems that they lose their life-giving and generative symbolic qualities? What happens to our need for symbols of darkness, moonlight and descension when they become ostracised from dominant culture; no longer passages to meaning?
As our art, histories, psyches and mythologies remind us, we need both sun and moon. Perhaps the contemporary challenge is to rescue, re-imagine and transform both. Perhaps, though, we must begin in and with the darkness. By opening ourselves to the call of the underworld, where we can dialogue with those most fecund parts of ourselves. The parts which lay at the foundation of all things. What happens if we re-engage with the underworld as a practice for alchemical transformation during these uncertain times? What if we live according to our ecologies, and learn how to descend as well as to rise? What if it is the only thing we can do?
In this talk for The Convivial, artist Kate Southworth and writer, artist and facilitator Sophie Craven will explore what it means to hear the call of the underworld and enter. Combining viewpoints from their practices and research in alchemy, magick, anthropology, mythology and systems thinking, Sophie and Kate will give a winding and multiplicitous talk through the entry, transformation and exit routes to, within, and from the underworld. How do we enter the underworld? How does it feel to be called or, indeed, to fall in? What happens within? Why and how is the process transformational? What is the particular architecture and logic of that unseen place below? And what does it mean to exit, to re-engage with the world after such a process of deep transformation?
The talk will end with an exploration of the erotics of reaching back out and flirting with the universe after being transformed by the experiences of the dark.
Speakers
Kate Southworth is an artist who believes the soul paints itself transforming. She thinks, perhaps, there’s a witch in place mutating.
Her work engages with magic, alchemy, mysticism and spirituality and emerges from a shrouded, hidden place. Telepathic moments and psychic transformations find their way onto the canvas.
Traces of spiritual and sexual energies cluster into forms within simplified landscapes. The paintings emerge slowly and there is much overpainting; a process of trying to feel the invisible form’s edges from a dusky cave of non-knowing.
Kate’s artwork is supported by practice-based research, including a PhD in Fine Art, that involves encounters with the mysteries of Otherworlds and indexing what the unconscious realm desires to become manifest.
Sophie Craven is a writer, artist and facilitator based in Cornwall, UK. She graduated from SOAS university in 2016 with a BA in Arabic and Social Anthropology, and a specialisation in memory, imagination and heritage sites (with fieldwork taking place in the West Bank of Palestine).
She worked in learning and facilitation for seven years before completing her MA in Poetics of Imagination at Schumacher College / Dartington School of Arts in 2024.
Her current research interests include mythology, folklore, ancient sites, trauma theory and psychology. Sophie is currently in the process of writing her first novel, Strange Places, which is a semi-fictionalised life narrative exploring the boundaries and meeting places between the imaginal, the mythological and the psyche.
