In some ways, Orgy for 10 People In One Body is one long super sigil.
And as I work on it, I keep learning about things that I may be doing intuitively that are connected to longer lineages of ritual through human history. For example, Orgy For 10 People In One Body 3 (the wooden piece) is the only piece in the orgy at a smaller scale. She is at a scale that is holdable and I found myself caring for her in the most tender way, sleeping with her, singing to her, caressing her and I noticed how healing this care on her body was for my own body.
I was working on the piece right when lockdown began and at the same time I joined a group called Enclosure - a collective of artists and medieval scholars that began meeting regularly in quarantine to talk about medieval art, enclosure, anchorites, saints, etc. We were all pretty raw when we first began speaking, getting the hang of zoom and our new monastic lives and in one of the first meetings I was telling the group about the small wooden sculpture and she was sitting beside me and they introduced me to the idea of sympathetic magic. I realised that this ancient human practice had made its way into my own.
Other rituals have been more intentional. For example in anticipation of the body scan from which the form of Orgy For 10 People In One Body 5 (The deer piece) was born, I worked almost like a method actor to “become” the deer. I ate only deer food, spent all my time in and around the deer meadows in the mountains near my studio, and listened constantly to a sacred motet by Arvo Pärt called the Deer’s Cry that is a kind of protective prayer or spell of concealment originally invoked by Saint Patrick in 433 AD to turn he and his monks into a herd of wild fawns when an ambush was upon them. I am really interested in transhumanism and transformation in general as a way of meeting and transcending our moment.