Therapeutic Landscapes: Ritual, Folklore, and Wellbeing

In this episode, Rebecca speaks with artist and researcher Sarah Bellisario, who will be joining Therapeutic Landscapes II: Ritual, Folklore and Wellbeing as part of the Magical Material Practice panel.Sarah’s work explores how symbolic objects are used within magical, spiritual, faith-healing, and therapeutic practices, asking what these material encounters continue to offer us in relation to healing, recovery, connection, and meaning-making.Together, Rebecca and Sarah discuss the development of The Humanist Deck, a magical, spiritual, and therapeutic art resource that grew out of Sarah’s fine art doctorate and her own creative healing practice. They explore how the deck has become a tool for conversation, reflection, art-making, and emotional recovery, with uses emerging across therapeutic, creative, NHS, and addiction recovery settings.The conversation also explores Sarah’s Goddess Project, including her contemporary goddess sculptures, the public offerings and wishes left for them, and her developing idea for a collaboratively created tarot deck made by many people, for many people.This conversation is about art as research, objects as containers of meaning, ritual as a holding space, and the power of making something tangible from personal and collective healing work.Sarah will be speaking on Saturday 13th June in the Magical Material Practice panel, with her talk Holding Space for Recovery: Creative Engagement with Symbolic Artefacts and Ritual Making. She will also be running a workshop using The Humanist Deck.Links:Sarah Bellisario: www.sarahbellisario.comThe Humanist Deck: www.humannisdeck.comSarah's Instagram: @artandthecraftTherapeutic Landscapes II: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org

Therapeutic Landscapes II is less than a month away, and in this episode, we take a look through the 2026 programme as the gathering begins to take shape.Want to join us, get all the details here: https://www.therapeutic-landscapes.org/eventsThe conference brings together artists, academics, practitioners, makers, performers, folklorists, researchers, and community workers exploring how place, story, ritual, creativity, memory, and embodied practice can support connection, care, and belonging.The episode highlights some of the fantastic panels and themes across the two days, including Re-Enchanted Landscapes, Experimental Archaeologies, Frolic, Misrule, and Creative Chaos, Pilgrimage, Procession, Pageantry, Making Communities, Magical Material Practice, Plants and Places, Haunted Landscapes, Folk Artefacts and Cultural Commons, and Writing Ourselves into the Land.The episode also celebrates the keynotes, workshops, performances, exhibition, and social gathering that will make the event feel less like a conventional conference and more like a meeting place for ideas, practices, people, and landscapes.Therapeutic Landscapes II: Ritual, Folklore and Wellbeing takes place on Friday 12th and Saturday 13th June 2026.View the full programme here:https://www.therapeutic-landscapes.org/programme-2026

In this second episode, Dr John Cussans and Desdemona McCannon look back at what made Year One so powerful: the keynotes, the workshops, the singers and storytellers, and the overwhelming sense from everyone who attended that they had finally found their people.They also look ahead. To a second year that's already shaping up to be bigger than the first, and to a longer vision of festivals, rural venues, and a network of practitioners, spaces and ideas that can keep nourishing each other long after the conference ends.

In this first episode, conference organisers Dr John Cussans and Desdemona McCannon share the story of how the Therapeutic Landscapes conference came to be. From an earlier symposium called Enchanted Environments, through their shared interests in folk culture, arts and health, and the healing power of place, to the moment the first call for papers went out, and the response was better than they could have imagined.