Living Mythically: On Art, Enchantment, and the More-Than-Human World
“Valley of streams and moon leaves,
Wet scents
And all that cries with the owl’s voice.
Influences, essences, presences,
Whatever is here, I share this place
With you
For all you give me, I offer thanks”
ITHELL COLQUHOUNI can smell that poem. Can you?
As the threshold approaches for my first solo show for a number of years, I’ve been asking many questions in the studio. One that gnaws at me as we navigate the current times is:
What does it mean to live mythically now?
To root our days not in productivity or performance, but in relationship (deep, devotional, and alive with story).
This question lives at the heart of my creative practice. I’m an artist working with painting and sculpture, but also with memory, myth, and the unseen. My work circles the space where the human and more-than-human meet. Places where stone hums, a story stirs, or a forgotten ritual makes itself known through something inexplicable.
The deeper river beneath my practice is myth, awe and enchantment. But not just the old versions. I’m very interested in reimagined myths and stories - new stories rooted in ancestral bones but shaped for these times. These myths are less about heroes and more about healing. I’ve been profoundly shaped by thinkers like Dr. Martin Shaw and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, whose writings remind us that myth and story are about escape, but return.
The work I make is also about the Land. The Land as teacher, mirror, companion, kin and witness. I believe in art that emerges from listening to the body, to place, to dream, to silence. The sacred is not separate from the mundane.
Some of the questions I’ve carried into the studio these past months (and into my life) are:
How do we re-enchant a world that favours numbness?
What does awe do to a person and why does it matter?
How do we walk in kinship with the sacred, without performance or appropriation?
What role does beauty and curiosity play in a time of ecological grief?
This is not purely theoretical. It shows up in the studio as:
Rewritten myths (like the ones I’m currently working with in my exhibition: The Handless Maiden, Bluebeard, and the Selkie)
Sculptures that echo ancient standing stones, without fixed narrative (weird moveable monoliths made out of plaster, beeswax and beads)
Paintings made through layered processes, using my non dominant hand for all gestural work
Process notes and many quiet failures
Musings on reciprocity, devotion, and dreaming
I’m interested in what happens when art becomes more than an object. When it becomes a talisman. When it holds a feeling you thought you had lost or becomes something that you mark a chapter with.
If you’ve ever cried in front of a painting or stood before a weathered stone and felt something ancient stir, THIS is the territory I’m trying to tend.
Stay curious,
C x