Guidance

Angelica Vanasse

Interview by L. Valena

August 8, 2022

Can you please tell me what you responded to?

I responded to an artwork called Soñar Con El Templo. The translation is Dream With the Temple. Right away, the thing that really struck me was the symbolism. That made for a really strong initial read of it, and it really shaped how I approached it. There's an elevated temple with a lot of steps, and there are people facing the temple, so I was thinking about rituals, maybe a journey or a procession, traveling to a destination. There’s a sense that they’ve prepared for this and now they’ve arrived. Then you've got the flames at the top and flowers. I love the combination of the imagery and color and pattern there. It felt like summer and the sun. It's very warm, fiery, sunny.

I was looking at it the same week of the new moon and I thought that was interesting. There's full moon and new moon, but with the new moon, there's not even the sun to bounce through and illuminate anything here. It made me think of cycles and how ritual is so often tied to the lunar calendar. In this cycle or journey, whatever we see will have an opposite. This felt like the summer: everything's in bloom, there's fire, there's heat, there's people. Then there’s new moon or dead of winter, when everything is dark. Those two things need one another. I was thinking about those relationships and what would the other half of this be? You know, when you hit the solstice in the summer, it's so lovely. But then you remember that the next day is going to be shorter. You feel like summer has not started yet and then it's going to start disappearing.

The title got me thinking about dreams. They are these weird, liminal spaces that we go into. Is it real? Is it not real? I love in-between spaces that don’t have to be one thing or the other but are more about process and experience.

I read something recently that said: It’s so wild that we accept as a normal part of human experience that every night we go to sleep, cross this veil, and have this totally different reality. Sometimes we remember it, sometimes we don't, but it happens. Our brain goes there. And we act like it's not a big deal.

There are people who live their lives being really black-and-white, rational, very ordered, but then having these wild dream rides. This is a thing that we do as humans, but it is so out there.

Yeah! For people who are really ordered and don't want to accept anything beyond what they can see, how could anybody not accept it when we have this as a common experience?

Some people are completely certain that none of this “airy-fairy stuff” exists, you know? There’s a logical reason for everything. But dreams are so not logical. Yeah, it's very interesting to think about how dreams are perceived. That got me thinking about the word “dream.” It can be used in a very positive way, meaning aspirations and hopes and dreams. When we're awake, we’re talking about your ultimate hope, your wish, your desire, and it's very positive. But then when you think about the sleeping experience, they're super unpredictable, they’re strange sometimes, they’re uncontrolled time. I wrote, “Is that more true to life than the ideas we hold about ‘dreams’ as an idealized word we use?”

Yeah, very cool. So what happened next?

So much happened! Let’s see. Thinking about new moon. I've always been really interested in rituals. When I was a little kid, I loved to be a witch and make potions. I had loads of bottles. My mom was super tolerant with what I did to all of her expensive spice jars. I made potions, collected bones and treasures. My whole life, there’s ephemera everywhere. I've always loved the idea of connecting to natural cycles and the power held within ritual when we align it with nature.

As part of my new moon ritual, I've been collecting a lot of rose petals this year. These were the last ones I’d probably find in abundance, so I thought I needed to do something very special. I’d seen this really interesting video of making a rose elixir that's meant to support heart chakra and heart opening and healing wounds, so I made some of that. I filled this beautiful circular jar with rose petals from the coast near where I live and some from my garden. Then you mix honey and brandy in whatever proportions you like. It was so sticky and golden and sweet and the petals were sinking in. It was this beautiful, thick solution that looked like sunlight. That was the first thing that I started making, which had to sit for six weeks.

I had a bouquet of flowers that I’d cut from my mother-in-law's garden. She passed away last summer, so I've been going back and tending the garden. I think even having flowers from there feels quite significant. I went through the whole bouquet, cut off every single flower, discarded the stems, and started making a composition with those. I think my head connected to the flowers that I saw in the artwork, but also, they were in full bloom and these are in decay.

I was in a very intuitive mode, gathering things to prepare. It’s interesting that these things, like blackberries, come in and around the abundance of summer. I was collecting things like a squirrel might pack things away for the darker months. At the same time, you’re holding things like a juicy berry, which embodies that feeling that everything is full and lush and ripe and there's all this potential.

Then I started arranging some of the small objects a bit more. I was thinking about taking the dying objects and arranging them in a way where I was making an altarpiece. I felt like I was making a tribute to something that wasn’t there, which perhaps links to the flowers from my mother-in-law’s garden. My whole life, I feel like I'm followed around by this need to collect and preserve memories, people and places through objects. I don't think I can live without collecting things. I like that this artwork made me think about the intention of how we arrange and prepare things, and what they can become.

You know, temples are often places where there might be a ritual or even burials there. That idea of preservation led me to think about preserving the very last of the rose petals. I brushed them with egg white and dredged them in sugar to preserve them and then baked them in the oven to dry them out. I made some cake batter. I put in hazel leaves, flower petals from the garden, and blackberries, made these little parcels and fried them. I was playing with lots of ways to gather, preserve, and potentially consume as a form of nourishment. I had some lovely ceremonial cacao, which was delicious. That's what I was tapping into as I was making the smaller painting. I did the arrangements and then I did the small illustrations of what I’d gathered. I was thinking I had to distill this into some sort of guidance such as oracle cards or tarot cards. What are the symbols that I collected? And so that's how I developed the small illustrations. Just a series of small ink and watercolor illustrations that explore all the preparation that we constantly do in life and how we take that forward.

While this was going on, I got quite ill. I'm okay now, but it can be quite scary when you don't know what it is. I started thinking, “I am going to die in this house, surrounded by all these little altars and things I've collected.” It's weird to think about what you actually have around you and what you’ve created if something's going to happen to you. So that's the guidance that I developed as maybe the last step of the process, even though I labeled it earlier. I took the images and linked it back to the new moon as well, because circles kept coming out. I distilled what I did but looked for the patterns within. I’d done a Permaculture For Artists course earlier this year and I experienced a lot of powerful learning around certain types of patterns in nature. I love looking and labeling in that way. Random scatter, spirals, spheres, and what those can symbolize in terms of a more personal meaning. For example, a sphere, to me, is very protective but it’s very much about a journey and a process.

First, I'm glad that you're okay. I know what you mean about when things come up like that, when you're in the midst of some spiritual work. There can be that really weird moment of “Have I angered somebody?” [laughs]

Have I summoned something by being so prepared for my afterlife throughout my whole human life? Have I been building my secret Egyptian tomb with all of the nice, pretty things I've collected? All of the shells… I guess that's nice in a way, but also bit grim. It's so interesting to think about when it’s through your personal experience, isn't it?

It is! I think it's so cool that you made this oracle deck. Have you done readings with it?

I haven't yet. Oracle decks are so interesting because of the question of how the readings will work, but I want to. I have a deck that I quite like, but I started wondering: Is this something I would do readings by? Is it my guidance for myself for the rest of my life? I love the idea of pulling a card and deciding, This is what I want to think about today. But I think that, because they were symbols that came out of my process, it’s the things you want to remember to guide yourself by. We can have these moments of reckoning that are so powerful and you say, “I am not going to do that ever again.” You make these vows, and then a week or two later when stuff gets back to normal, you forget about that powerful experience you had. I feel like these are markers of that. For me, I can remember to remember by using these. I haven't done a reading yet, but I think I want to explore how I could do that.

This may be the wrong question to ask, but do you see any particular piece of this as being the “final” artwork?

I know what you mean. Last time, I did a triptych and so it had three things. So this time, we're gonna send you four things! I had the altar image, which to me was a bit of a starting point. And then I had the offerings, which were the smaller objects that I did a collage with. And then I had what I called the guidance. I'd say the guidance in the cards is probably like the final thing. Then I did the new moons to try to capture the circular nature of what came out, but I suppose that might go earlier.

Let's see, is there anything you’d like to touch on that I haven’t asked about?

At one point when I was making, I asked myself, “Am I preparing for life or dreaming?” It's that idea of consciousness and what guides our decisions. I think a lot of this emerged in contrast to the places we find ourselves in life that are dictated by work and other commitments. In the past few months since going freelance, I've been really interested in how we can more embody an aligned way of being. In my professional life, the way that I coped with it was by fracturing myself a bit, so I could deliver certain things as a professional person while I also had all the things that I love and do at home. And I’m wondering how to align the two more. In a way, I feel like that happens when we make artwork. It’s inviting all the parts of you to do something together: the part of you that feels oppressed or restricted by work and being an adult and the part of you that dreams, wants to make things and be really impulsive and intuitive.

Do you have any more advice for another artist now that you’ve done this twice?

The first time I participated, it felt like a big thing. I'm putting myself out there. I remember feeling daunted putting myself out there. You might have gone to art school, you might not, and then you might have certain feelings about presenting your work: if it's valid, if you're a real artist, all of these things that we start being quite restricted by sometimes. I think doing this helps me get over some of that in a really beautiful way.

I feel like I came at it with a different confidence this time because I've done it before. I let my interests and my intuition guide me, and I didn't feel as fixed on having to produce a specific output as I did last time. The prompt this time was very different from the last piece that I responded to and I wanted to approach them both differently. So I embraced the confidence, I embraced the learning, and I tried not to worry about repeating the way I approached it last time. You know, we get so hung up on trying to perfect something before we've even tried the process. It's about remembering that it’s unique because it's me and there's no one else that's me doing this right now.

That's awesome.

This is such an interesting and powerful way to work. You're getting a glimpse into what someone felt was an endpoint of what they were creating and you’re coming at it knowing that you're part of this big, ever-growing organism. I love knowing that what I created last time is in there somewhere and I love seeing what’s come out of that. That's so encouraging! I think it's a really empowering way to explore creative process.

Call Number: M54VA | M56VA.vaGu

Angelica Vanasse is an American bred, UK-based creative practitioner and cultural consultant living in Lancashire, England with her partner and their springer spaniel pup Duggie Buttons. Angelica works as an engagement and learning specialist in outdoor settings, museums and galleries alongside exploring creative processes rooted in connection, wellbeing, photography, drawing, writing and sculpture. Cakes are one of her favourite creative mediums.