Shewings: a cosmology

Shewings unfolds as an evolving cosmology: a field of painting, ritual, and symbolic enquiry shaped through co-creation with veiled beings, herbs, and liminal spaces. It traces psychic processes of transformation across conscious, unconscious, somatic, and otherworld registers—drawing on parsemage, planchette work, dream incubation, and somatic listening. Herbs such as mugwort, vervain, and yarrow serve as ritual companions, opening passageways between inner and imaginal realms.

This cosmology emerges as a symbolic structure and living archive: gathering fragments into shifting relation. It holds the fragility of emergence, the instability of becoming, and the co-creative nature of transformation. Threads, figures, and symbols appear through paintings, drawings, writings, rituals, and gestures—each contributing to a wider fabric of meaning. These acts trace the movements of psyche through image, pattern, word, and threshold.

Rather than presenting fixed stages or defined outcomes, Shewings sustains a mutable flow. Psychic material surfaces, dissolves, and reconfigures: articulating the soul’s movement through image, pattern, and threshold. Over time, fragments form temporary constellations—gathering into exhibitions, events, books, and evolving digital spaces.

Informed by feminist reworkings of alchemy and distributed epistemologies, Shewings resists closure. Instead, it invites ongoing relation: a rhythm of becoming that remains provisional, porous, and alive.

Twelve Elements of Shewings

Shewings unfolds through twelve symbolic elements—each shaping the psychic, material, and imaginal terrain of the work. These categories form a living structure: not as fixed definitions, but as porous vessels through which images, rituals, dreams, and reflections emerge.

Each element offers a distinct way of working with transformation: from the alchemy of becoming to the subtle care of tending; from dream fragments to symbolic constellations. Together, they shape the evolving terrain of Shewings as it unfolds across paintings, writings, events, and ritual forms.

Some elements currently hold only the outline - the pulse of a structure still forming. Others already host fragments of the work. Over time, these elements will gather more: gestures, texts, images, and thresholds of meaning. Some elements, such as Dreams, Tending and Rituals emerge without tangible form. Sometimes aspects may be documented and included in the archive; sometimes not.

These categories are not endpoints, but threads. They invite return, reconfiguration, and relation.

Paintings
A field where emergent images surface through intuitive, symbolic, and geometric forms.

Cosmology
A symbolic structure made of 12 elements that shape the ongoing work.

Constellations
Provisional groupings of paintings, writings, fragments and rituals

Dreams
Psychic material that arises in unconscious, imaginal, and otherworld states.

Fragments
Nascent forms—images, sensations, or texts—that surface before resolution

Figuring
Reflective writing, drawing, or conceptual enquiry that shapes thought.

Alchemy
A symbolic process of mutual transformation between soul, matter, and spirit.

Turnings
Seasonal thresholds that mark inner and outer transformation.

Tending
Somatic and herbal practices that open passageways of care and attention.

Rituals
Symbolic acts that invite transformation through gesture and relation.

Fields of Thought
Theoretical threads that underpin the cosmology and practice.

Living Archive
A dynamic space where earlier materials lie fallow or reconfigure.