The River Beneath the River

This project tells the stories of women living ritualistically and ceremonially in Devon and the wider South West of the UK. Through photography and conversation, I want to explore how ritual, ceremony, and sacred practices are shaping everyday life, and why they matter in this moment of collective uncertainty.

Growing up in Derby I did not have an alter in my bedroom, now it is a non-negotiable in the home, which I see in so many of my friends, but particularly the female bodied. What is happening here as many of us grew up in atheist or religious households and we turn to developing often isolated but authentic relationships to source in and outside the home.

I want to explore and be changed by the documentation of the lives of women and the female-bodied, in the South West, who are reweaving ritual into the fabric of their everyday through meditation, dance, singing, altars, time in nature, and gathering in circle and more. This project asks: what does it mean to reclaim the sacred in a culture that has lost so much of its own lineage, and too often appropriates the traditions of others? How can we root ourselves in practices of connection without erasing where they come from, or simplifying them into something consumable? What does the sacred even mean in times like this and how do we capture it in image?

This work is not about making beautiful portraits, even if they are, for it its a form of cultural activism — a response to the deep fractures of our times. Centuries of colonisation, industrialisation, and patriarchy have severed many of us from ancestral practices of ritual, land-based knowledge, and communal ceremony. Spiritual life in the West has often been flattened into dogma on one side or commodified “wellness” on the other, leaving little space for nuance, complexity, or personal connection to the sacred.

In a world facing ecological collapse, mass loneliness, and social fragmentation, the ability to gather, to mark transitions, to honour the body and the land, to release grief and hold joy together — these are not luxuries. They are survival strategies, and they are deeply natural and deeply political.

The conversations guiding this work ask questions such as:

• How did you come to ritual and ceremony?

• What do these practices mean in your daily life?

• What guides, symbols, or places feel sacred to you?

• How do ritual and ceremony support you, and why do they feel important today?

• What visions do you hold for the future of these practices in community?

By weaving together portraits and words, my hope is to contribute to the cultural work of remembering, unlearning and learning. Our stories are not only personal but collective: they remind us of what was lost, what is returning, and what we must tend carefully if we are to move forward with integrity. I hope to showcase photos and stories of reclamation, resistance, and reconnection — showing that the sacred is alive in ordinary life, and that tending to it is both an act of care and of defiance.