A month-long exhibition from The Mary Leyline Pilgrimage (Sarah Hartnett & Lucy Stein) with a programme of events and interventions.

Death Mother,
Compassion can be born of despair when we see each other’s struggle. Our pilgrimage is a site of social context: a multiplicity of cultural contents enmesh and produce diverse types whether heterodox, mythical, formal or informal, revealing the eternal behind the common place. We too become the exquisite corpse through which the mulch and psychic humus of female wandering is regurgitated. Our work has developed in tandem with a shifting context of a brutalised post neo-liberal-pandemic-wartorn era. We are trying to forge a kind and quiet esotericism that can’t be pinned down in name but that fights from within by showing the broadness of notions such as fertility, enchantment, rebirth and spirit.

Together we disgorge owl pellets of shredded experience atop fence posts at the boundary of our consciousness: objects, rituals, texts and events are extracted from these skeletal knots. We follow dream diversions up and down spiral staircases, along canals, over headlands and towards afterbirths. Now we skirt the edges of Greater London mourning our painful lack and offering the Bandstand as an arena for psycho development or a peaceful space for healing….or somatic work. We trace the arena and dress the space with May foliage for Rebirth and becoming. The melancholic profession of Psychoanalysis provides us with a methodology for inner and exterior journeying: a process by which one may actively reenact past traumas as a way to master & overcome them. In other cases, reenactments occur inadvertently and result from the psychological vulnerabilities and defensive strategies characteristic of trauma survivors, and with this in mind we offer a stage for RE-ENACTMENT and reintegration.

Through performance, might illuminations come to bear hope for matrilineal future’s past?

Kingsgate Project Space