BLOG – Page 3 – STEFANIE ELRICK

‘If it calls you, you should come’ – The Art of Crossing Over

June 6, 2016June 6, 2016 Stefanie Elrick1 Comment

Back in February 2014, at the ‘Visions of Enchantment: Occultism, Spirituality & Visual Culture’ conference in Cambridge, I first met Cavan McLaughlin. Despite the fact that we’d been sat through two days of talks exploring esoteric traditions in art and literature our conversational starter was our shared love of tattoos (it’s always the way!). Cavan spotted my Dark Crystal ‘Great Conjunction’ back piece and ended up showing Loren and I his ink, a meditating man sat amidst a psychedelic serpentine landscape. From that moment on we knew he was our kind of guy!

Two years down the line and not only has Cavan’s younger brother Michéal come to Loren for a DNA Tree of Life tattoo but I’ll also be speaking at a conference Cavan has put together in Sept – ‘Trans-States – The Art of Crossing Over‘. I love how the Fates conspire to weave their sticky webs around us.

I’ve got a lot of respect for Cavan, he’s an artist, social activist and academic all rolled into one and has assembled an International Team of Esoteric Bad-Asses in one place (no mean feat!). He is also a visual artist and makes music videos for metal bands like this one for Denigrata.

Trans-States is all about transformation, trans-humanism, trans-mutation, body modification, altered states and the blurring of boundaries. I’ll be presenting ‘Written in Skin – Flesh As A Language Frontier’ for the third time but for the first in front of a magickally minded audience. As the conference is taking place in Northampton, even the elusive Alan Moore is jumping on board (he’s one of the keynote speakers!!) and meeting him is one of my lifetime ambitions. Needless to say I’m treating the whole shebang as a highly synchronous (and nerve-rackingly terrifying) event. I’ve got symbols from Mr Moore’s Promethea comic tattooed on both my thighs for God’s Sake! Fingers crossed I can form an orderly sentence when the time comes….

Marco Pasi, a brilliant scholar who we met at the ESSWE magic conference in Latvia (yes, these are our holidays – FULL ON geeks…) is another keynote speaker and Patricia MacCormack, whom I’ve never read or met but specialises in “posthuman theory, teratology, animal rights, European horror films, chaos magick, Lovecraft” – SWUUUURWOOOOON, will also be stirring the cauldron. With so many practitioners, scholars, artists and performers in one great melting pot of energy I’m too excited to get it in my system!

If it calls you, you should come. You can register here.

‘Trans-States – The Art of Crossing Over’

9th – 10th Sept – 2016 – Northampton University.

Lovecraftian Romances and Black Gnosis

May 19, 2016May 20, 2016 Stefanie ElrickLeave a comment

Last Sunday night I had a chat with the very talented Scott R Jones, founder of Martian Migraine Press, editor of the upcoming Cthulhusttva : Tales of the Black Gnosis anthology, which will include a short story written by yours truly, titled Mother’s Nature. Scott is also the author of When the Stars Are Right: Towards an Authentic R’Lyehian Spirituality, a collection of essays and meditations on the concept of cosmic horror as a spritual path. It was whilst reading When the Stars Are Right on holiday in Marrakech last November that the threads of Mother’s Nature came together. Scott’s work is exceptional and massively inspiring.

At the heart of When the Stars are Right is a dark spirituality that seeks out revelatory madness and commands an embrace of our shadow side, a philosophical perspective which nourished many of the ideas I’d been gestating for a while. If you’re a lover of cosmic horror, weird fiction and Lovecraftian deities in general or just enjoy a good intellectual unraveling from time to time, I highly recommend the read. Mother’s Nature responds to all these themes whilst adding a few flavours of its own.

I’m not going to lie, MN is not a tale for the faint of heart. It mixes horror, sexuality, sacrifice and enlightenment, revolving around a young girl who escapes one nightmarish existence only to step into an entirely new one. After living her life practically feral, then surviving the massacre of her family, my central character is rescued by a mysterious stranger, who tames and then trains her to be his apprentice in a fashion boutique with a well-kept secret. Under his instruction the girl becomes an artist, then a woman, then something else altogether. Transcendence and transformation are the strongest themes of the work and I had so much fun weaving them together.

Whilst giving the interview I remembered the impulse I had when writing Mother’s Nature to make it a Lovecraftian romance, however paradoxical that may sound. The more I read the story the happier I am that I’ve achieved that and I couldn’t agree with Scott’s comment more when he says the story ‘has legs.’ It definitely does, hundreds!

You can buy Cthulhusttva : Tales of the Black Gnosis Here and When the Stars Are Right: Towards an Authentic R’Lyehian Spirituality Here.

Pinning Down Beginnings

May 18, 2016May 18, 2016 Stefanie ElrickLeave a comment

At last! I’ve built a website for nothing other than my thoughts, projects and mental meanderings. This blog will be a diary, an online photograph and video album, a dream journal, a place to ponder and purge and somewhere I can collect the weird and wonderful evidence of things created by myself and with other people.

So much has happen that it’s difficult to know where to start. I will retrace my steps and share writing and projects long since passed, as well as keeping this blog up-to-date with upcoming shows, appearances and events. Don’t expect a linear line. I prefer the collage effect, the messy montage and I’ll share as things bubble up. So many characters, concepts and performances have already been lost in the sands of time despite my best attempts to capture them. They’re willful little things with lives all of their own. I don’t begrudge them their autonomy.

Every single piece was the most important thing in the world for me during it’s conception and creation. It’s the same with every artist I believe, or at least I think it should be. I planned, plotted, scribbled and choreographed, rehearsed or revised over and over and over again, scruntised every detail, made costumes and invented personalities, performed it once for a certain group of people or sent it off to a publisher then let it go forever. André Breton said an artist “lives like an open book and does nothing to retain the pages, which fly away in the windy wake of his life.” So many of my pages have flown away, I’m glad I gave them wings.

So this blog is a way of numbering those pages, as well as other fleeting things, before they flutter off into the world. I’m pinning down their beginnings at the very least.

Image taken from Alan Moore’s Promethea comic.

Header image by Glyn Smith.