‘Animisms’ opens at Mothership Gallery in Marrickville this 1 May. 2018: Animism is a catch-all word for the sense that the things around us have agency. Your suspicion that the printer only decides to jam when you’re going to miss a deadline? Animism. If you yell at your car, you don’t get to look down on folks who see spirits in rocks and rivers. You just don’t. Heathcliff Sheridan has a structured view of this experience, approaching it in collage through the symbols and metaphors of Western Hermeticism. Gabrielle Bates is your genuine Hedge Witch, an esoteric activist fighting to protect her neighbourhood by making ritual objects out of street flotsam. On the wrong meds, Kay Orchison spent ten years talking to his dead friends through walls and carrying around the little bits of mystery metal and other crap you find in gutters as divinatory talismans. As well as admitting to this in public, he has also just made an horrendous esoteric folklore pun by stuffing a traffic light into a tree stump. Why any of this? Well, your frontal lobe is late to the party. Any party. It’s the bit of you that figures out causation, makes categories, knows you are separate to the rocks and the trees, and it processes sensory information after the rest of you. You know how in dreams that one place is a library but also your old bedroom? That’s your hind brain running around hooting without Frontal Dad telling it to shut up. Understanding that everything is connected occurs too deep inside you for the bits of you that are embarrassed by it to reach. Acting on information that arrives before it can be processed is what got you out of the way of that bus just now. An inchoate sense of environmental unity has intrinsic survival value, which is how you still have it. Pagan animists are people who employ this experience directly. They allow environmental information to feed back into behaviour without recourse to causality. If you want to get all “Well Actually…” about it, calm yourself and consider how Cambridge Analytica just caused Trump and Brexit using correlation alone. In Animisms (1-6 May at Mothership Studios), Sheridan, Bates and Orchison engage their personal takes on animism honestly and directly and in the beautiful things they have made in doing so. – Written by Kay Orchison, 2018
