Ritual Invocations of Elemental Beings: Listening Beyond Productive Fertility alongside Ithell Colquhoun

A Sound-Essay

Ferrett, D ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8421-6308 (2025) Ritual Invocations of Elemental Beings: Listening Beyond Productive Fertility alongside Ithell Colquhoun. UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract / Summary

Ritual Invocations of Elemental Beings: Listening Beyond Productive Fertility alongside Ithell Colquhoun explores the intersections of sound, voice, and (non)motherhood, extending into questions of ecology, occult practice, and feminist critique. Building on earlier research into dark sound and the ways misogyny is inscribed in cultural discourse about sound and the female voice, the project considers how the binary of fertility and barrenness underpin gendered violence, biopower and colonial capitalist extractivist attitudes toward the planet.

Through a pre-recorded sound essay, the project draws on the work of surrealist and occultist painter Ithell Colquhoun, whose automatic techniques correspond with elemental forces. These techniques are translated into sound improvisation by four musicians prompted by a ritual invocation which sought to invite and manifest elemental forces—Earth, Air, Fire, and Water—as agencies other than the human. These improvisations were framed and informed by Pauline Oliveros’s practices of deep and quantum listening, in dialogue with Colquhoun’s techniques and painting; the ritual invocation transformed the studio into an organic “alcove” of encounter with non-human energies.
Colquhoun’s techniques reveal what she referred to as the “mantic stain,” where elemental force and divine knowledge is revealed through material process. In the ritual improvisation, this gave rise to a “mantic melody” which was, in turn, carried into a Beltane ritual performed in Cornwall on the dawn of May Day morning 2025. Set within the context of climate crisis, the project uses sound, listening and ritual to question dominant value systems tied to productivity and fertility, and to imagine alternative futures and interspecies relations that resist extractive and binary logics.

Item Type:	Other
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Ithell Colquhoun, Improvisation, Ritual Invocation, Listening, Fertility and Barrenness, Elemental Beings
Subjects:	Performing Arts > Music & Sound Philosophy & Psychology Sustainability & Environment
Department:	Academy of Music & Theatre Arts
Depositing User:	D Ferrett
Date Deposited:	29 Sep 2025 15:07
Last Modified:	29 Sep 2025 15:07
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/6173

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