The Threaded House: Orientation
Kate Southworth, Unseen Worlds, 2025. Powdered charcoal on paper, 21cm x 29cm (Private Collection).
The Threaded House: Form and Material
The Threaded House is an artwork, a cosmology, that offers a space of unfolding: a practice of painting, dreaming, ritual, and writing that moves with calendrical time. The work appears in fragments - dreams, images, words - each tracing its own path toward meaning. What emerges may linger at the thresholds or dissolve like a dream.
The Threaded House holds:
receptive images made through drawing, collage, and painting
writings and paintings shaped by symbolic attention and alchemical process
rituals, dream fragments, and seasonal observances
presences, figures, and thresholds that ask to be entered
As the Threaded House unfolds, meanings gather slowly.
Domains of a Living Cosmology
The symbolic structure of the Threaded House includes a series of shifting domains. These are not literal rooms, but archetypal spaces; mirroring rhythms of cultivation, care, making, exchange, ritual, transformation, and healing.
The full structure of these domains first emerged in a dream. What appeared there has become a living cosmology, one that continues to evolve through attention and symbolic practice.
Elemental and Alchemical Cosmology
The artwork and the cosmology unfold across multiple symbolic registers: alchemy, calendrical time, psyche, and transformation. The masculine Sulphur and feminine Mercury are not seen as oppositional, but as co-present and transformative: a third element, Salt, mediates between spirit and soul and grounds the work in the body and the field. Transformation follows no fixed order, yet it’s helpful to follow threads through the stages of alchemy: Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas, Rubedo.
Alchemical Flow
Alchemical transformation references four symbolic stages: Blackening, Whitening, Yellowing and Reddening. Although these are understood to relate to each other in a non-linear way, they can also be usefully aligned with the calendrical year and the nine transition points. Each brings a distinct quality to the unfolding of time and the work. The year does not turn in even quarters. Some stages linger. Others return unexpectedly.
Figures and Presences
Figures sometimes emerge within the Threaded House. Some arrive clearly whilst others emerge half-seen. They seem to appear as symbols, colours and dream-feelings. They pass through particular rooms, calendrical moments, and hover at thresholds. One such figure - the Witness of Beginnings - listens in the dark. She observes the transformation of feeling-fragments into myriad forms. Her presence/absence offers a porous kind of attention that weaves with the unfolding work.
Forms and Fragments
The work unfolds in fragments:
Paintings, drawings, and collages
Poetic fragments and reflective writings
Diagrams, maps, and charts
Rituals and spells
Lists of instability
Performative documentation
Traces of presence and absence
Field notes
Records of dreams and active imagination
Receptive drawings and writings
The fragments emerge and fade; sometimes gathering into provisional constellations.
Ways of Working
The work of the Threaded House unfolds through lived, symbolic, and receptive forms of practice. These methods allow the psyche to speak in its own language - often obliquely, through image, rhythm, and touch.
Ways of working include:
Receptive painting, drawing, and writing
Herb work for attention and otherworld connection
Calendrical observances through ritual
Dream incubation and active imagination
Symbolic mapping
Slow gestures of care
These are not steps in a process, but thresholds through which meaning constellates.
Invitation
The Threaded House offers a fluid space for you to dwell with fragments, trace resonances, and sense the fire beneath the surface. Alongside reflective writings, paintings, and symbolic texts, you’ll find invitations: rituals, creative activities, and guided visualisations to explore and enact. These may open onto new threads in your own symbolic life. You are invited to linger, return, and enter as you wish.
The shape of this work is open. It ebbs and flows with a rhythm of making and unmaking. If you choose to linger here, I hope something in the weave resonates - however quietly - with your own patterns of transformation.