Ritual theatre is a newer development in my contemporary art and performance practice, but one that goes way back in terms of my interest and engagement.
In theatre it is about using image, sound and action to create live rites rather than conventional drama. My Eidophusikon work, Scenes from the Journey of a Soul, is conceived as a modern ritual theatre piece: a sequence of visionary tableaux that guide the audience through an inner, initiatory voyage. My play Apologia extends this approach into spoken theatre, incorporating several authentic ritual sequences researched from 18th‑century magical history. Together, these works explore how historical esoteric practices can be reimagined on today’s stage as living, participatory art.
My film practice is evolving to engage with aspects of ritual. My current film project explores oracles.
My first artwork-performance ritual was Calling the River: the 72 Angels of the Shem HaMephorash at the Steamship project Space in 2021.
The Thames is a silver thread running through London, binding the city into a single living body even as it divides it in two: north and south, docks and palaces, mud and marble. It carries ships from source to sea and beyond, but it also bears other kinds of journeys: visionary, magical, inward. For this project I imagined three such journeys taken by some of London’s most enigmatic magicians. In 1583, Dr John Dee embarked at Blackwall on the first stage of his voyage to the mystical court of the alchemist‑emperor Rudolf II in Prague. In 1904, Aleister Crowley sailed for Cairo, where he would claim to receive the revelation that became the foundation of Thelemic practice. A few years later, the great goddess‑diviner Dion Fortune, priestess of Isis, walked the Thames in the moonlight, conjuring an occult London mapped in currents and tides rather than streets.
To mark and re‑enact these occult itineraries, I created a series of image‑sequences that combine river landscapes with rune casting and sigils: cryptic spells that encode calls, invocations and summons. These workings are never meant to be permanent; they must always be dispersed or erased by water, air, earth or fire. At low tide I walked the Thames beaches and gathered stones from the foreshore. Back in the studio I painted runes onto them, then returned to the river, casting the marked stones and leaving them on the strand to be slowly reclaimed by tide and weather, to sink or be carried back out to sea. Each stone is a small, temporary altar to a journey that has already happened and to journeys that can only take place in the imagination.
Woven into the project is a strand of angelic magic drawn from the 72 Angels of the Shem HaMephorash, a corpus of angelic entities from the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. Each angel is linked to a specific divine name and function, embodying particular qualities: guidance, protection, healing, wisdom, spiritual growth, and many more. Since the sixteenth century, these angels have played a central role in Western esotericism, especially in Hermetic and ceremonial magic. Ritual practitioners have invoked them for protection and moral clarity, through prayers and ritualised names, talismans and diagrams. Later systems associate each angel with a 5‑degree sector of the zodiac and with particular Tarot cards, binding them to time, fate and the subtle weather of spiritual and emotional life.
The performances grew directly from this matrix of river, angel and sigil. On the damp sand of the foreshore I drew angelic sigils and then walked over them until they vanished. I inked sigils onto paper and set them alight on the beach, the smoke rising, thinning and disappearing into the air above the river. I copied sigils from the Goetia onto black paper and tried to burn them, but they refused to behave: instead of turning to ash they slipped from my fingers and floated away, impossible to recapture. One by one they flew up into the air and out over the water, as if returning to their own element. The work is shown as digital slide sequences on three screens: a triptych of journeys, workings and disappearances along the shifting edge where London meets the Thames.
Exhibited as digital slide shows on 3 screens.