Mutable water: imagination, intuition, dreams, desires.

I’m thinking about art about artmaking. My own process is in disarray at the moment, and I am finding solace and guidance in the work of other artists grappling with these questions.

Cardinal water: oceanic feelings, water, psychoanalysis, intimacy.

I was an adult when I learned to swim, and I think that is why water is troubling and desirable to me, and why it appears in so many of my dreams and visions.

Cardinal air: lightning knowledge, shock of awareness, excitement, fear.

The restless prickle of adolescent longing led Izzy beyond the invisible boundaries of the forest, and into a drinking game that had bloody consequences.

One Halloween night, six friends decide to take a moonlit walk through the woods.

Only five come back.

Fixed water: petrichor, deep wells, decay

The sun doesn't disappear. We just can't see it as much as in the height of summer. There is treasure in the void. There is gold in the dark.

Mutable water: illusions, hopes + fears, unknown pleasures

A snake isn't worse than a rose if you are looking for a way to kill a character. A jewel isn't better than a tornado if you want to move the action of your story somewhere else.

You are going into a state of trance and time just kind of goes and there's this sort of animal channel between the head and the hand and it's wonderful.

Mutable air: research, reflection, voice

You unearth your work like an archaeologist discovers treasures, or a farmer pulls up crops.

Mutable fire: mass psychic currents, desires, teaching and learning

In the writing workshop, there is more free association than we admit, and there is more impossibility than the form officially allows.

Fixed earth: salt crystals, haunted forests, deep rest

The cocoon is not about shame and fear and perfection but it does allow those elements to be held; it contains multitudes. It allows those things to decay and to be renewed. It is miraculous.

Fixed air: hacking, repurposing systems, linguistic play

Berg’s collection offers this small hope, this tiny act of witchcraft in a collection that both reproduces and interrogates patriarchal violence and its necrotizing effect.

Mutable fire: film screens, spectrality, excess

‘You want to pee in a red hood you want to lock yourself inside the house. You want to sleep with the wolf. You want to turn on the oven.’

Fixed air: revelation, visions, futures

These everyday objects take on a plastic significance, the ashtray is a repository for waste, and the mingling of the ash with the ‘pink seat’ suggests an uneasy disruption of categories.

Fixed earth: wild animals, practical witchcraft, poetry

Rathore’s poem ‘Alison Device (1594-1612), named for a Pendle witch, is a beautiful meditation on mortality and desire.

Cardinal earth: rapaciousness, growth, deep roots

Hedges, like lawns, are of no use to the witch unless they are overgrown, wild, and generative.

Fixed fire: blades forged in fire, revenge, steadfastness

For the proper adherence to ritual we had shaved our hair ultra-close, and smeared on a square of silver zinc.

Mutable fire: emergencies, cinematic glimmers, glowworms

The dark spools forward and I grip the branch. I lunge into the deep mud and my holy communion dress is ratted at the hem.

Fixed water: unfinished business, deep emotions, divination

We record this by leaving the work unfinished and unresolved. The absence is a space for grief.

Mutable fire: wild fire, contamination, neon.

Anna and Melissa ate with some ceremony, taking tiny bites and washing them down with tea.

Fixed water: death, mourning, transformation

Her body is a miracle in the house. Copper sulphite leaks from her. The sink blooms with a little mould, a little sparkle.