PLANT MAGICK
Alchemy (dried flowers, water, flour, matches, pencil lead, fire, smoke)
Performance
2024-2025 – ongoing
Nature predates the existence of humans by roughly 4.25 billion years, with modern humans only being in existence for the past 200,000 years. Nature was here long before we were ever a part of the story. We are born from it, a part of it, our existence really is a miracle of circumstance, of perfect harmony. Nature is wise beyond our imagination, having spent billions of years perfecting it’s balance, it’s flow, it’s harmony amongst everything we find within it, long before humans were ever a part of the equation. Plants, trees, and flowers have long played an important and significant role in how humans commune with nature. There was a time when our ancestors revered nature, worshipped it, and considered the Earth itself a Goddess. We were for a time enmeshed with it, in harmony, as a part of the balance within it, never separate from. Nature was the altar our ancestors held worship and it’s long overdue that we must return to a balanced relationship with it. We must once again become stewards of the Earth. Our very existence depends upon it.
Where plants are the connection we have to our biology, the Moon is our connection to our intellect, our emotions, our subconscious, our instinct. The Moon influences each of us, predicting our dreams, impacting our memories, and revealing the nature of our emotions. The moon is the most tangible evidence we have of the universe and our relationship to it. Just as we have an outer persona that echos the Sun, we have an internal world living in the shadow within, and this is the Moon. The dark side of the moon, the face we never see, mirrors our internal shadow, the dark, the concealed unknown places. All life on earth is reflected through the Moon, it is the metaphor of the life cycle.
Alchemy is a form of speculative thought, that among many aims, tries to discover the intersection between the concrete, imaginative, experimental, and hypothetical ideas. It is considered to represent the attempt to discover the relationship between human and the cosmos, much like the practice of Astrology, which is the study of human existence in relationship to the stars. While Alchemy has traditionally been more concerned with terrestrial nature, in modern time it has come to encompass the esoteric, the unknown, that which we cannot explain.
Plant Magick is an alchemical process connecting and honouring the relationship between nature and the cosmos. Using Astrology as a kind of roadmap, each month I look at the placements of the moon in it’s New and Full phases. The New Moon is meant to be a time for calling in, for manifesting, where the Full Moon is a time for reflection, release, of letting go that which no longer serves you. Further, the sign that the moon phase falls into each month is going to affect what it is we should be focusing on manifesting or releasing; a kind of extended framework. For example, a New Moon in Aquarius is a time to manifest energy that allows us to untangle knots in our lives and to find pathways that help us to break free and move forward with this manifested energy. It might also be a time to look within and ask for blessings and guidance for our hearts greatest desires. Once I have this framework in place I then look into the medieval understanding and uses of plants. I look at specific plant properties as they relate to their planetary relationships, guiding elements, specific powers and magical uses. Essentially I am creating a alchemical ‘recipe’. Flowers and plants are pressed, preserved, archived and then assembled into boxes according to their particular properties and in accordance with the research and recipe I have assembled into a burnable offering.
Plant Magick, is part art and part spiritual practice. Its a blend of many different aspects of my life but mostly the culmination and synthesization of my lived experience. It is a reflection of the various realms I find myself wandering through: the past, present, and future mingling into one. These are my layers, myself reflected in Nature, and the constellations of the Cosmic energy I am connected to. This is my alchemy.
VIDEO DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY //\\ Adrianna Hankins
