Kate Southworth, Greg Humphries and Julian Vayne are the members of The Order of the Sun and Moon. The name of the Order is taken from the title of an essay by Ithell Colquhoun, British painter, occultist, poet and author. Colquhoun was part of the British Surrealist Group before being expelled because she refused to renounce her association with occult groups.
Kate Southworth
Kate Southworth is an Irish/British artist based in Cornwall, UK. Her work engages with magic, alchemy, mysticism and other spiritual traditions and she is interested in their relationship with new technologies and digital cultures. Her work spans painting, drawing, rituals, spells and digital works.
In her work, Southworth draws on the concept of mutuality to explore all the spaces within and around us, including the liminal and interstitial spaces between psyche and landscape, self and other, human and non-human, material and spiritual. For Southworth, mutuality has the potential to become a transformative force that can disrupt centralised and hierarchical structures and contribute to a new understanding of interconnected subjectivity.
Southworth’s paintings often depict dreamlike and cosmic landscapes that are inspired by the remotest regions of Cornwall and Ireland. They reference the transformations of the calendar year, pregnancy, birth and the maternal, and the emergence of new forms of becoming. They often depict a range of animals, including birds, horses, serpents, seahorses and strange, otherworldly creatures that seem to emerge from a world beyond our own. Her work involves the use of ritual in painting and in the landscape as a way of encountering that which rests elsewhere.
Her work has been disseminated nationally and internationally. In addition to solo and two-person shows, it has been included in more than 35 group exhibitions including Craftivism at Arnolfini, Bristol, and is archived in online collections. She was quoted extensively in Vox magazine’s 2022 article on ‘Why we need rituals, not routines’ and her work was featured in Interalia magazine’s issue on Alchemy, Occult and Esoteric Art Practices – ‘Ritual Forms and Transformation’. She was interviewed about her paintings, rituals, politics, network forms and calendric practices by Marc Garrett for the Furtherfield Podcast.
She has taught at Universities in London, Dublin and Cornwall and has given talks on contemporary art at Tate St.Ives, Tate Britain and Tate Modern.
She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Manchester Polytechnic, and went on to complete an MSc in Multimedia Systems at the London Guildhall University. She later earned a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Leeds, where her supervisors were the artist Chris Taylor and art theorist Griselda Pollock.
https://www.katesouthworth.art
Greg Humphries
Greg Humphries is an artist based in Cornwall / UK. His work has been rooted in magical philosophy, ritual, indigenous wisdom and thinking for over 25 years. His interests for the past 15 years have been based around how artists can address Climate Crisis and species decline through land art, painting, sculpture, and educational programmes.
Collaboration and co-creation are key concepts in his work; be that with other artists, the audience, the Natural World or beings from ‘Other’ worlds. Often using natural materials and processes he attempts to open up, sidestep the ego and allow space for these other collaborators to have a voice in the work. This lends itself to many automatic and semi automatic processes, and brings into question the idea of artist as sole creator.
Visually and theoretically, the work itself aims for a deeper engagement with the audience, often spanning the boundary between realism and abstraction, exploring the liminal space between the visible and the invisible, psychology and geography, or, this and other worlds. This fluidity and liminality allows for multiple readings of the work and encourages ‘slow’ looking while the colour scheme of many of the works follow “The Four Scales of Colour” set out by The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn.
His work has appeared in multiple group shows over the years and larger sculptures appear in private collections nationally. The collaborative nature of the work led to him setting up the company Future Tracks in 2010 which has spawned many successful residencies and educational projects with partners such as Tate, Falmouth University, Cornwall Wildlife Trust and Cornwall Heritage Trust.
He gained his degree in 1992 and an MA in Fine Art Contemporary Practice from Falmouth University in 2009 where his supervisor was Daro Montag. He is co-author (with Julian Vayne) of ‘Now That’s What I Call Chaos Magick’, Mandrake Press, 2004 and Walking Backwards: The Magical Art of Psychedelic Psychogeography’, The Universe Machine, 2018.
Julian Vayne
Julian Vayne is a British independent scholar, artist and author with over four decades of experience within esoteric culture: from Druidry to Chaos Magic, from indigenous Shamanism through to Freemasonry and Witchcraft.
Growing up in the Britain of punk and then rave culture Julian immersed himself in the philosophy and techniques of magic. His journey into group ritual practice began within the Western Esoteric Tradition when he was 16. Since then he has worked in ceremony with practitioners from many different lands and lineages. Julian is a senior member of the Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros and widely recognized as one of Britain’s leading occultists.
In the 1990s Julian edited Britain’s best selling pagan newspaper Pagan Voice and in 2001 published one of the first books of the modern psychedelic renaissance, Pharmakon: Drugs and the Imagination. In addition to exploring traditional sacred medicines, Julian’s work includes the first published accounts of the entheogenic ritual use of ketamine and several novel psychedelic sacraments.
Today Julian is the author of books, essays, journals and articles in both the academic and esoteric press. He sees his work as part of the process to help re-imagine an earth-centered, non-dogmatic, open-source spirituality. He shares his practice through mentoring, workshops, online teaching and retreats. Julian’s style is highly collaborative. With an academic background in teaching and learning, and as co-author of numerous texts, Julian’s style emphasizes curiosity, collaboration and creativity. His approach is informed by chaos magic, deep ecology and lineages within Wicca and Tantra.
Julian is a co-organizer of the psychedelic conference Breaking Convention, and a Trustee of The Psychedelic Museum Project. A founding member of the post-prohibition think-tank Transform, Julian sits on the academic board of The Journal of Psychedelic Studies, and has been a visiting lecturer at several British universities. He is an advocate of post-prohibition culture and supporter of psychedelic prisoners through the Scales project. Julian facilitates psychedelic ceremony, as well as providing one-to-one psychedelic integration sessions and support. He is the author of the celebrated Getting Higher: The Manual of Psychedelic Ceremony. Since 2011 he has been sharing his work through The Blog of Baphomet.
julianvayne.com
The Order of the Sun and Moon 