ra, fired stoneware, pigments, 2026
calliope, reduction fired stoneware, 2024
loam (F), fired stoneware, 2024
loam (B), fired stoneware, 2024
aural, pigments on fired stoneware slabs, 2026
ma, fired stoneware, sand, shards, 2025
mnemosyne, pastel, engobe, pigment on fired stoneware 2026
aural, 2026
pigments on fired stoneware slabs
In her recent short essay, ‘When women were horses’, Rachel Crummey wrote: ‘The Fire Horse is an imaginal cell multiplying as fast the fires of violence. Her cells burst open in flames and are alchemized into forces of potent strange beauty – unpredictable, fierce, aligned with chthonic gods and deep time intelligences. These cells are waking up and once aroused, no one can say, no one can know, what is truly possible.’
Who, or what, is the ‘imaginal cell’ ?
the living spirit of the story that desires to be expressed
the relational substrate within which the story unfolds
the latent, elemental space stirring within (where the story lands)
the mutual, and reverberating, impact on the concentric field
How does the circle contextualize the line ? What are the ethics of an invisible world ?
Hearing, ‘act from the future that is seeking to emerge’
Circumambulation is an ancient practice of ritually moving around a sacred center. The invitation is to start where you stand and move into life with trust. I am struck by the felt shape of continual rounding – no matter which direction one turns, one is held in relationship to love. Belonging as direct; disclosed.
How to honour the imaginal; to court a wild tongue
The horse, a ‘...reinvigorated heart whose magnetic aura has no bounds.’
_______
mnemosyne, 2026
pastel, engobe, pigment on fired stoneware
When Rachel and I started working together as SALT in 2022, we opened the possibility that our visual vocabularies could learn to dance together – could learn to become intimate. We framed this as ‘re-imagining studio practice as one of encounter’ – an experiment in reciprocal apprenticeship practiced through tending the living image; a ‘compost cartography’ or 'consensual cross-pollination’ between us.
In the first year of collaborative work, SALT apprenticed with Ganoderma Lucidum (Reishi Mushroom) as living teachers of ‘not knowing what the thing is’ – of how to navigate ‘developmental indeterminism’ in artistic practice. Mycelium as material, embodied as metaphor. We operated under the principle that ‘to study a flexible network, (we) had to assemble a flexible network.' * Through an imaginal lens, that flexible network became our shared field – and we turned our attention towards listening to, and making from, the reverberating threads emerging from our overlapping perspectives, atmospheres, aliveness, languages and experience.
How to practice listening together ? SALT 'Sympoeisis' – making with – is a co-sensing-through-drawing invitation developed to externalize, and make visible, connections evolving between mutual perspectives and practices. As water is impressed with ripples, it is also a visual experiment in disclosing the sacred impact of relationship on our felt-sense for shape.
On Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center this January, Rachel and I had a precious two weeks together in-person to prototype a body of work centering 'listening from the middle’ – shaping speculative forms that gesture to the spine and midline as a channel for communion. Working from the archive of Sympoeisis 'seed card’ drawings, we iterated and expanded upon shapes and forms developed earlier in our collaborative partnership. There was a fluid quality of visual and material hybridity that felt like an exciting development in cross-pollination; I experienced myself opening to shapes that felt unique to our interstitial. Fruiting bodies.
The above work is a ceramic slab wall piece started in Vermont. It bridges line language from one of Rachel’s 2024 seed drawings with my own, and is a continuation of my exploration of formal, tactile and lyrical relationships between drawing, painting and sculpture. Drawing defined by a quality of haptic pleasure – a spatial flowing forward of felt-level vitality in-situ. Stepping into convergence, and colour.
re-membering // not-forgetting // new suns
______________
eunoia, 2025
reduction fired stoneware, sand
In a love letter to the Church of the Intimate Web, my friend Cheryl Hsu wrote, ‘...to be present with and willingly disclose what is most immanently intimate in my direct phenomenal experience is liberation – it is the transversal line of flight into new potentials, it is a portal to metamorphosis.
To meet and befriend the felt risk and terror of the human body that exposes its naked, trembling heart to Reality – to friends, family, colleagues, community, cosmos – is the ritual act of cosmopoeisis. To keep on falling in love as the sacrifice that re-makes Sacred World.’
Phenomenology is the study of lived experience—how things feel, appear, and make sense from the inside. Attunement gestures to the empathic capacity to feel-with or feel-into another – to be with another in their world with sensitivity, equanimity, care and respect. If shared listening is understood as process and path, devotion is then to practice, cultivate and expand perceptual range for felt-level resonance and attunement.
To attune is to align, harmonize or become sensitively aware of interwoven, and often invisible, fields of relationship. Feeling-with one another is a means to come to know each other, and ourselves with more texture, dimensionality and nuance.
Who is the type of being
Who is deeply in love
Fully expressed
And cultivating embodied trust
In the larger web of life ?
Hearing, ‘You must prioritize intimacy’
tremblings, physiological coherence and the fragrance of wild honey
empathic attunement and a recovery of our ecstatic self in love
soft close; interstitial listening
celebrating four contact landings this summer into the furthest pole expressions of each of my cardinal directions;
groundlessness and commitment to coherence by an alternative register
listening from the inside out
the significance of a seaworthy vessel
a return of my sense of smell
honouring here with prayer,
we are the trees we plant
in the one earth of one another
that they flower there
together: flowers we bring on the living
branch to one another,
uncut, rooted
in the darkness where there are
no other faces, shapes or colours,
no bouquets, no other
others,
and in spite of that,
all others
the flowers of the body VII // bringhurst
____
nous, fired stoneware, 2025
eunoia, reduction fired stoneware, 2025
aleo, fired stoneware, 2025
ingot, barnacles on shale, 2025
logos, engobe on fired stoneware, 2025
there’s nothing new /
under the sun /
but there are new suns
epigram, ‘parable of the trickster’ (unpublished)
octavia butler
_____
a new music is a new mind,
the many-pointed star,
How can a responsive body /
and our mutual commitment to listening /
develop faculty and resonance for new forms?
I find myself reflecting on difference ~ what it means to orient towards good soil (right relationship) over all other metrics. To prioritize ground as the seedbed from which all good things grow; to live love / grief as praise and prayer.
Struck by a sense of the great gift of invitation to tend that future now in so many small suprasensible ways; in service. To turn towards, choose for and nourish / reanimate previously exiled capacity spectrums. To listen for, and act from, what I can imagine as the subtle arc of a perceptual and emergent just-just-just-beneath unfolding song
a song being sung elsewhere
resonating everywhere
small arcs of larger circles
aphanipoeisis
effloresce x
not pretending to be anything else but stone
the specificity of difference
incoherent; ekphrastic
quartet, 2025 – fired stoneware; approx 4.5" x 4.5"
umbra, 2025 – fired stoneware; obvara – approx 7" x 9"
Io (R), 2025 – fired stoneware; obvara – approx 5.5" x 5"
Io (L), 2025 – fired stoneware; obvara – approx 5.5" x 5"
* accompanying photographs, shore series 1 – 8, taken on Taystay’ich // Denman Island, BC ~ May 2025
re: re: re: neither necessarily symmetric nor orthogonal // polyprismatic ~~~ jan zwicky, the experience of meaning
neum, 2025 – reduction fired stoneware with local slip, 7'' x 10''
* accompanying photographs, shore series 9 – 12, taken on Taystay’ich // Denman Island, BC ~ May 2025
we form a secret partnership with possibility ~~~
_
interstitial listening
on Taystay’ich // Denman Island, BC ~ May 2025
Opening the first form of a four-month research residency period on Taystay'ich // Denman Island, BC ~ May 2025
A confluence of asks as I land here. Necessary uroboric – the intimacy of vow
Interstitial Listening is a six month research / creation project mapping felt-level listening through clay. This project encompasses four one-month, semi retreat-style residency periods – two formal (at Township10 in North Carolina in June, and Similkameen in British Columbia in July) bookended by two self-directed (on Denman Island BC in May and on Vancouver Island BC in August) – followed by two months in my Montreal studio to focus on, and develop, edit and score the choreographic ecology of this work.
In March, teacher and dance researcher Nita Little invited me to reflect on what presuppositions underpin my practice and inquiry – to learn how to name and own one's root metaphor. Holding and offering forward: ‘my embodied experience circles the intersubjective’. How to speak and move from this place ? This time an offering in remembrance and amplification of my most intimate orientation; the felt sense. Creating the frame ~ the pattern disrupt of inhabiting a strong contextual constraint in service of attuning to my senses; to listen. Establishing a field of trust and becoming available to what wants to be known through you
The generosity to let a thing be what it is ~
Here, I witness my clumsiness in language – I also observe my iambic pentameter. Then, when confronted with the curve of the shoreline or a coiled snake or a bed of shards, I feel myself pause. The apprehension of something; a resounding "this". Sometimes this tracks or lands in my system as 'rest here’ in this fullness, this thick. We pause and we drink and the water is clear. Something to the tune of roundness – there is density or texture and it is asking to be met with the fullness of your attention. How are we attending ?
Action research; participatory knowing, playing shapes
slowing down the frame rate
firewalking
Thank you for nourishing me and holding me accountable in more ways than I can name
~~~~~~~
2024
prayer ∞ offering
speculative forms in language, practice, process and methodology for empathic attunement
Key Words (Flower)
Organic Intelligence, Epistemic Core, Cellular Consent, Cellular Effervescence, Embodied Language, Felt Sense, Sympoeisis, Lyricism, Vibrissae, Free Play
Key Words (Soil/Root)
Attentional System, Nervous System, Haptic Perception, Biosynchrony, Biognosis
Curriculum
Nervous System Literacy
Embodied Anatomy
Sympoeisis // Lyric Attunement
Writing the Bones
Tending the Living Image
Contact, and Composing Emergence
Correspondence
Articulation
Scores
Sound
pelvis // vessels as portals
volcanology ~ still, video short (0:59)
shot at White Wall Studio in Tiohtià:ke // Montreal, QC ~ December 2024
inexorably reciprocal // rooted in space ~ video short (0.55) text excerpt from emilie conrad, life on land (pg 321)
shot on Xwe’etay // Lasqueti Island, BC ~ August 2024
wind horse for chorus – score, Pauline Oliveros (1989)
~~~ (00:16), shot on lək̓ʷəŋən // Victoria, BC ~ January, 2025
~~~ (01:06), shot on Xwe’etay // Lasqueti Island, BC ~ August 2024
in a state of trust ~ transcribed text passage from video Contact Improvisation at John Weber Gallery, New York, 1972 with Nancy Stark Smith and Steve Paxton
braided verticality
on the potency of vessels as portals of
orienting towards a responsive body
on sustained practice and capacity for yes
on taking root to fly
body, earth
subtle body, 2024 – fired stoneware, approx 7" x 11"
symmathesy, 2024 – glazed stoneware, approx 24" x 8.5"
lithos, 2024 – fired stoneware, approx 7" x 11"
monarch, 2024 – glazed stoneware, 9" x 12.5"
caduceus, 2024 – fired stoneware, engobes, 6.5" x 6"
volva, 2024 – glazed stoneware, 10" x 12.5"
abacus // bells, 2024 – glazed stoneware, approx 8" x 15"
swoon, 2024 – glazed stoneware, approx 18" x 24"
wand (flower), 2024 – fired stoneware, 5" x 12.5"
* accompanying photographs, sand series 1 – 7, taken on Xwe’etay // Lasqueti Island, BC, Canada ~ summer 2023
invitation
we understand time as a spiral, a cocoon, a shell, a manifold
move at the pace of the nervous system
orient by fermentation wisdom,
Time is a key ingredient
// there are many ways to be a fungus
what needs to die
what feels alive
a beginning and an end (that will end),
and then begin again
we, a field, a web
a song
SALT
petasus, 2024 – fired stoneware
detail, Janina, Rachel Crummey, 2023 ~ mixed media on canvas, reishi mycelium, 66 x 44 inches
field, 2024 – glazed stoneware, raw clay, 12" x 16"
mnēmōn, 2024 – glazed stoneware – (L)
~~~~~~~
2023
diamond, 2023, stoneware, glaze, 15” x 6” x 13”
lingham, 2023, stoneware, glaze, hemp, reishi mycelium, 16” x 4.5” x 14.25” (growing)
installation view, the plumb – sympoeisis // fruiting bodies, 2023
lemniscate, 2023, stoneware, glaze, sand, hemp, reishi mycelium, 22.5” x 6.5” x 27” (growing)
detail, lemniscate, 2023
sphere, 2023, stoneware, burlap, hemp, reishi mycelium
pelvis, 2023, wood
LP2 and LP3 ~ stoneware, glaze, hemp, reishi mycelium, 4” x 4” x 5”
installation view, generative root – sympoeisis // fruiting bodies, 2023
Dense Web // Reverberating Midlines – SALT Vol. 1 ~ printed zine, ink on paper, 7" x 10"
Sympoeisis // Fruiting Bodies
August 4 - September 3, 2023 @ The Plumb
Peter Campbell, SALT (Rachel Crummey and Tara Dougans), Erin Hunt, Sara Maston, Joy Wong, and Thea Yabut. With sound by Luke Loseth
Special programming with Anne Bourne
Curated by Rachel Crummey and Tara Dougans, with support from Emma Welch. With immense thanks to the Canada Council of the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for funding our research.
Photos by @lfdocumentation
~~~~
Exhibition Text
Jade stone and alder flower essence combined with oil paint, the sea surrounding Fogo Island, pieces of plastic picked from the shoreline, burnette horses counted from the car; Ganoderma Lucidum merged with hemp fibre, canvas, and wood within its tapestry of tissue; Streams of sonicscape, the soundfield of the breeze amongst the blooming sumac along Caledonia Road and movement near the gazebo; Scoby — once a source of slightly effervescent kombucha; once a slippery surface floating and fermenting sweet tea — hangs as a flag, mother, motherland; aura of the earth, electromagnetic noise from various recent everydays and early days; lichen on stone, the texture of a meadow with blades of grass cupping dew, twigs, roots intertwined deep; a duck nest along with duck feathers and duck eggs, a steady single drip drip drip drip drip drip drip from the basement ceiling; fruiting reishi mushroom filling the form of ceramic vessels: sphere, shelllike cornucopia, pelvis, and lemniscate as in the geometry equation with two loops which meet at zero also referred to as the infinity symbol also seen as a eight lying lazy; paper pulp fossilized record of touch pinched with fingers, calyx: the leaflike sepals which enclose the petals, a cup-shaped cavity, and dorsal: relating to the back of an animal, plant, or organ.
Sympoeisis, which Donna Haraway writes “means making-with...It is a word for worlding-with,in company,”1is a kindred approach of the exhibiting artists: Peter Campbell, Rachel Crummey, Tara Dougans, Erin Hunt, Luke Loseth, Sara Maston, Joy Wong, and Thea Yabut. Collaboration and cross-pollination are their chosen ways of creating. This applies to their relationship with peers and extends across species and earth — particularly in the case of Crummey and Dougans who convene weekly within the framework of SALT (The Sound / Institute of Sensual Awareness, Language and Touch), for improvisatory somatic practice consisting of meditation, sounding, movement, and drawing. Their initial research questions, ‘What can fungi teach us about improvisation?’ and ‘What can listening together teach us about emergence?’, draw the participating constellation of artists together.
These fruiting bodies are the result of time listening, sensing, digging and digesting, composting, tending to, caring for, and percolating. Each exhibiting artist has crafted a unique process in which contemplation and emergence are key and yet, the urgency of “our times for learning again, or for the first time, how to become less deadly, more response-able, more attuned”2 is also present.
Text by Ashley Culver
1 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 56.
2 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 98.
~~~~
To learn more about the understory of this project, SALT (The Institute of Sensual Awareness, Language and Touch)
sympoeisis (solstice), SALT (Tara Dougans and Rachel Crummey) at Artscape Gibraltar, collected stones, 2023
ufo, unfired stoneware, approx 18 x 34 inches, 2023
compost cartography ~ still, video short (0:59)
shot at White Wall Studio in Tiohtià:ke // Montreal, QC ~ April 2023
to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, glazed stoneware, 4.25 x 7 inches, 2023
to digest the world where it is, porcelain paper clay, 2023
~~~~~~~~
2022
glazed stoneware, 8 x 11 inches, 2022
the sculptural series field of quieting considers the relationship between rituals of pause and attunement and the cultivation of interior capacity for sensory awareness, complexity and emergence. Senses and nature ((sensing nature // nature sensing) are approached as interchangeable and engaged as unfolding, interdependent systems of complexity observed, and tuned into, through practices of listening.
forms or threads are understood as mycelial ~ symbiotic, synergistic, pluralistic, mutualistic;
matter as matrices within which objects emerge as polyphony
installation view, field of quieting, glazed stoneware, left:9.5 x 6.25 x 0.75 inches; right: 11.25 x 6.25 x 0.75 inches, 2022
earth bodies // clay blends from 5; 3.5 x 3.5 x 0.25 inches each, 2022
installation view, field of quieting ~ 0, reduction fired stoneware, 23.5 x 23 x 6 inches, 2022
reduction fired stoneware; custom maple frame; jute fibres, 2022
installation view, field of quieting, glazed stoneware, top: 8.5 x 7.5 x 0.75 inches, middle: 11.5 x 6.5 x 0.75 inches, bottom: 11.5 x 6.5 x 0.75 inches, 2022
glazed black stoneware, 12 x 12.5 x 5 inches, 2022
fired porcelain, 2022
reduction fired stoneware, 9 x 6.5 inches, 2022
reduction fired porcelain on stoneware, 8.5 x 5.5 inches, 2022
glazed stoneware, 2022
haloed/fired stoneware; custom walnut frame, 9 x 4.5 inches, 2022
reduction fired stoneware, 2022
fired stoneware, 10.25 x 6.75 inches, 2022
fired stoneware, 10.25 x 6.75 inches, 2022
glazed stoneware, 11.5 x 6.5 x 0.75 inches, 2022
fired stoneware, 10.25 x 6.75 inches, 2022
~~~~~~~~
2021
reduction fired stoneware, fired terracotta / vermiculite, 2021
seed syllables
in the forest, of the forest
have you ever heard the sound of an iceberg melting ? caring for a tree
clay as connected to sound
sound as connected to touch
this being, that becomes
invitations, question marks, kinesthetic waves
conductor of music
swift serpentine of hymns
whistling through reason
the flowing bridge
((( drawing in the dirt )))
glazed stoneware, fired terracotta / vermiculite, 2021
to love, to hope, to tremble // flower, unfired stoneware, 14 x 16 x 7 inches, 2021
begetter of every blossom // both sides now, unfired terracotta; stones, 23 x 18 x 3.5 inches, 2021
kyo͞opələ, single-channel video; 16:9, 1 minute 12 seconds. Original Score. Aural Tapestry; One voice, 2020.
