top of page

Woolgatherer's Collective 2020-21

Susanne Cockrell, Rebekah Edwards, Angela Hennessey and Deborah Valoma

The Woolgatherers Collective met as colleagues at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. We formed Woolgatherers as an experiential research matrix to explore our interest in liminal and threshold zones, the intersections of dreaming, death and grief work, ancestral lineages and healing, and attunement to the land, be it urban street or salt marsh. We are social practice artists, weavers and crocheters, documentarians and archivists, poets and manifesto writers, workers with soil, linen, hair, and gold, death care advocates, researchers, activists, and scholars. The collective was formed on-line during the pandemic outside of our academic roles. The four of us met regularly during lock down to commune and digest the shifting social dynamics and ruptures of the pandemic and build support as we shifted to remote/online teaching mid-semester.

Some questions we are beginning to outline include: How is a dream more than individual psychic data? Do dreams speak to each other? What’s possible in sharing dreams/daydreaming in a social space? Is the dream a social form to bring new knowledge to light? How is walking a somatic immersive dreaming process?

In July 2021, I facilitated our participation at the International Walking Encounters/Conference: Walking as a Question? in Prespa, Greece. We led a remote walking performance called WOOL GATHERING along the water’s edge across the globe, synchronized across time zones. For Walking as a Question, Wool Gatherers proposes to offer a written score/prompt inviting conference participants, wherever they may be geo-located, to walk with us, synchronized across time-zones. Walkers will be asked to record their unedited stream of thoughts via images, audio, or text, which will be posted on a project website.

​Walking Encounters PROPOSAL

The walking body is the dancing body. As in dance, prolonged repetitive movement can hold the body in a transitional state at the edge of consciousness, in a hypnagogic-like state of lucid questioning, insights, and enhanced creativity. The walking body is a falling forward body, a catching body, a transitioning body, a questioning body. A walking body dreams. 

 

Wool Gatherers is a social dreaming collective of four visual artists and writers who work with  dreams and daydreaming as a movement process and aesthetic methodology. Rather than analyze dream material as data points related to personal psyche, we engage the intelligence of somatic immersion as a way to attune and communicate with each other, the plants and animals, and the ancestral histories that thread through our bodies and the lands we walk on.

The collective proposes a series of synchronous walks, taken separately that investigate walking as a collective dream space. Over a period of weeks before the conference, our walks will take place in liminal zones: during the transition hours of dust and dawn and in threshold landscapes that are interstitial with questioning. Our inquiry is to discover what, if any, alignment of experience might emerge without verbal communication between walkers. We will collect unedited streams of consciousness from these walks into a series of choreographic questions.

Some questions we are beginning to outline include: How is a dream more than individual psychic data? Do dreams speak to each other? What’s possible in sharing dreams/daydreaming in a social space? Is the dream a social form to bring new knowledge to light? How is walking a somatic immersive dreaming process?

Performance documentation by Walking as a Question? participant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Dreaming is a collective form of dream sharing that I was introduced to by Dr. Susan Webb and the wondrous Women's Social Dreaming Matrix.


‘Social Dreaming’, as pioneered and developed by Gordon Lawrence and his colleagues is, put simply, a practice of sharing and working with dreams within a social space. It is the practice that, in turn, informs and shapes theory and against which theory is both built and tested. Since the first experiment, launched by Gordon Lawrence and Paddy Daniel at the Tavistock Clinic in 1982, while practice has continued to evolve and develop there have been a small number of constants which may be taken as  guiding principles that serve to define the field and its boundaries. These concern respectively the parameters of task, process, setting, management and leadership

    bottom of page