Ritual, Myth & Mysticism: Inclusive Religious Practices in Contemporary Art

CLASS DESCRIPTION

In the context of renewed interest in ritual forms, origin myths and the artist as mystic/ priestess/ shamaness, this lecture will explore how contemporary artists are adopting and adapting devotional cultures (including indigenous and pagan/ folk forms alongside world religions) to create inclusive experiences. Rituals are reperformed, origin stories are reworked, mysticism is recontextualised and religious communities are recreated, producing decolonial, feminist, queer and ecologically-oriented worlds.

We will consider the work of artists (Grace Ndiritu, Holly Slingsby, Zadie Xa and Michael Dudeck among others) deploying performance, experimental writing, installation, textiles, painting and participatory practices toward a mystical and ecological re-enchantment. These artists work against Western ideas of ‘nature’ as beyond the human, instead seeing human bodies as porous, as an entanglement of nature-cultures, immersed in weather-bodies and river-bodies, as the human driven impacts of climate change are felt across all kinds and scales of being. The works perform a feminist new materialist inversion of the binary of woman-nature/ man-culture, and foreground that we are all ecologically interdependent body-worlds.

At stake in these practices are a number of questions: can religious belief and practice be reappraised and newly mobilised toward a politics of inclusion? Can we speak of a ‘religious turn’ in contemporary art? What is the status of truth and fiction within such practices? In a time of culture wars between the forces for tradition and the need for progression and change, what might it mean to reshape religious tradition through artistic practice? Against the perceived secularisation of culture in Europe and North America, and in a time of culture wars and far right ascendency, this lecture will consider the changing relationship between religious culture and contemporary art and how the inclusive politics of these practices speak to the plurality of feminist and queer experience.

ABOUT OUR LECTURER

Dr Kate Pickering (she/ her) is a London-based artist, writer, and lecturer. Pickering researches the entanglements of ecological bodies and sacred sites through writing, performance, making and drawing. She is interested in how contemporary artists are taking up devotional cultures and practices, performative rituals, vocalisation and story-telling to produce decolonial, feminist, queer and ecologically-oriented worlds. Her research into Julian of Norwich as a proto eco-feminist figure within Christian mystical tradition will inform new work for a group exhibition titled The Rule: Shaping Lives Medieval and Modern at Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (2026). 'There is a Miracle in Your Mouth', an experimental non-fiction book based on her research, was shortlisted for the Prototype Prize for writing at the intersection of literary and artistic forms. Recent work includes the curation of a live performance event ‘Ritual/Bodies’ at St Pancras Church (London, July 2024); a site-based performance lecture that drew on the Catholic history of the Jan van Eyck Academy and its local ecologies (Maastricht, 2023); a writing commission for Kate McMillan’s solo exhibition ‘Never at Sea’ focussing on climate change and migration at St Mary Le Strand Church (London, 2023).

INSTAGRAM: @writing_a_body_of_belief

WEBSITE: https://kate-pickering.com/

IMAGES CREDIT

Grace Ndiritu (2021) Labour: Birth of a New Museum, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, photo courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London

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AUTUMN/WINTER TERM 2025

Monday 15th September

Luisa-Maria MacCormack (she/her)

Female Sexuality and the Male Gaze

Monday 22nd September

Dr. Kate Pickering (she/her)

Ritual, Myth and Mysticism: Inclusive Religious Practices in Contemporary Art

Monday 29th September

Julia Kotziamani (she/her)

Misogynist Bureaucracies: Administrative Erasure and the Feminist Body

Monday 6th October

Noelle Perdue (she/her)

Post-AI Pornography

Monday 13th October

Erin James (she/they)

The Real Housewives of Racist TV Tropes: a Black Feminist Reading of Reality TV

Monday 20th October

tbc.

tbc.

Monday 27th October

tbc.

tbc.

Check back for the second half of term…

RECORDING

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