The Insurrection Interviews podcast is part of Magic and Ecology, a year-long series of talks and online events where we invite researchers thinking about magic in relation to ecology, and practitioners working with magic to transform modes of earth-living in order to enable collaborative thinking across disciplines and practices. In this episode your hosts Simone Kotva and Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal talk animism, creativity and death with Charlotte Rodgers, our project artist.
Charlotte Rodgers is a UK-based artist and author who works with remnants of the dead and the discarded to create talismanic and totemic art. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at galleries in the UK and US. Charlotte also gives talks and has collaborated in numerous workshops, and is the author of The Sky is a Gateway, Not a Ceiling: Blood, Sex, Death, Magick and Transformation (2014), and The Bloody Sacrifice: A Personal Experience of Contemporary Blood Rites (2011), which chronicles her use of road kill and blood in art, ritualized scarification, tattoo work and magic.
Charlotte’s arresting “creatures” always reminds the viewer that no thing, however apparently lifeless, is really dead. They are also testament to the fluid nature of death itself, the way unities (selves, bodies, persons, desires) fragment after death and are recomposed into a myriad new things. Charlotte writes: “Everything holds life-force, energy and potential. I work with the memory held in remnants of the dead, the forgotten, the discarded and the rejected. I honour these memories through acknowledgment, then use the past as a foundation for new directions and realities.”
Charlotte’s art is exhibited virtually as part of the Magic and Ecology project, and is also featured on the Magic and Ecology website where you can explore more of Charlotte’s work.
MAGIC AND ECOLOGY is hosted by CRASSH the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge, and co-convened by Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal, Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe and Simone Kotva.