AUTUMN ALCHEMY EXHIBITION
ANGELICA VANASSE & SQUASH CREATIVES
11AM – 3PM SATURDAY 28TH & SUNDAY 29TH OCTOBER & 12-4 PM WEDNESDAY 1ST NOVEMBER (SAMHAIN)
You are welcome to this nurturing space and exhibition that weaves together 8-fold land-based rituals, creative processes and practices rooted in the Squash community of gardeners, cooks & artists. At this annual point of endings and beginnings in the Celtic tradition, Autumn Alchemy celebrates what has been planted, grown, gathered, crafted & discovered over the seasonal cycles of sharing life together, on Windsor Street.
Autumn Alchemy is a collaboration with artist Angelica Vanasse who from the autumn of 2022 has worked with community gardeners to develop and deepen creative, nature-based, ritual practices in Squash’s community garden. The exhibition builds on this playful series of art-making sessions that explored human identity and our place in urban nature.
This site-specific installation will evolve through activation, with the contributing artists responding to the space through their own creative processes. It is also a contemplative space of welcome, creativity, wellbeing and participation; Alchemy in Action.
Alchemy in Action will be taking place throughout the exhibition opening hours and will take different forms. This will include artists exploring through drawing, painting with natural inks & working with fire, plants & the weather. Come along to witness and take part in this unfolding creative gathering.
When you visit you can get involved in conversations, tastings, intention-setting and connecting with ancestors as we honour the end of the 8-Fold Year and welcome in Samhain, the darker, more wintery half of the year. This is a calm place for stillness, reflection & nurture of the self, within community.
At Squash we embrace the 8-fold year; a celebration of the Earth’s yearly cycle of change – life, death, growth and transformation. We have annually celebrated the 8-fold year as an activating force & reflective tool supporting the evolution of our 100-Year plan since its inception in 2010, through marking the Quarter points – Winter and Summer Solstices & Spring and Autumn Equinoxes and the Cross Quarter Points that fall at seasonal peaks (the Four Great Fire Festivals) of Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh and Samhain. These 8 chapters create the Wheel of the Year that connects us to the continuous cycles and changes in nature and ourselves.
CREATIVE LEADS:
ANGELICA VANASSE – LEAD ARTIST / CREATIVE PRODUCER
BECKY VIPOND – CO-DIRECTOR / CREATIVE PRODUCER
CLARE OWENS – ARTISTIC DIRECTOR / SOCIAL ARTIST
HELLEN SONGA – HORTICULTURAL WORKER / CREATIVE PRACITIONER
JACKIE SWANSON – HORTICULTURAL LEAD / CREATIVE PRODUCER
JASON HUGHES – HORTICULTURAL TEAM / CREATIVE PRACTITIONER
With the Grapes Community Gardeners & SQUASH TEAM
‘The old Celtic festivals fall at eight points during the year, and are a means by which we can connect to the Earth’s passing seasons and acknowledge the way this resonates within ourselves, as part of the natural world.’ – Glennie Kindred, Sacred Earth Celebration
