Eros & Imagination ONLINE
Eros & Imagination
NOTE: This online workshop is an invitation into this inquiry / exploration online.
The content will be related to but not the same as the in-person workshop on November 8.
You could do both the online and the in-person workshops.
Your eros is your imaginal realm. What was quietly there before you saw evidence of someone else?
An early part of each of us had some sort of awakening of eros, a moment we suddenly noticed a charge, a surge, the movement of wind on our skin, or the scent of someone or something passing by. This awakening of the senses is unique to each person. An imprint still remains of that touch into eros, into the richness of our own imagination. What was that for you?
A sense of wonder. A magnetic attraction. That raw, wild current of life force, a compelling pull toward something, primal energy moving before you had words for it. Some call it shakti. Some call it jing. Some just call it a spark.
I am deeply curious about what turned us on before our idea of what is beautiful, or interesting, or erotic, or sexy was mediated by other people’s experiences. Before we saw any photographs or movies, before we read someone else’s description. What is your own native imagination? Unmediated? What is your unique connection to eros?
Join us for an afternoon of exploration through meditation, embodied practice, and creative exploration. We will tap back into that initial impulse, the spark behind your love of a certain color or way of making marks, or being in water, dancing, or watching the night sky. It’s time to remember what was always yours.
No experience necessary.
We’ll start by spending time with artists and writers who worked close to this kind of unmediated attention: Hilma af Klint’s diagrams of unseen force, Leonora Carrington’s shapeshifting figures, Remedios Varo’s solitary mystical interiors, Francesca Woodman’s intimacy, presence, and disappearance, Wangechi Mutu’s hybrid, earthbound female bodies mid-transformation, and Anaïs Nin’s insistence that we see things not as they are, but as we are. None of them were illustrating an idea. They were each expressing something beyond language.
Through meditation, embodied practice, art, poetry, and intuitive making, we slow down and return to what has charge, before we explain it, judge it, or compare it to anyone else’s version. What opens? What disturbs? What enchants? What keeps returning, and was always, quietly, yours? Reach back into your own poetics.
That native spark doesn’t stay untouched for long. Somewhere along the way, an image arrives, from a photograph, a film, a magazine, a screen, and starts to alter what we once felt on our own. We turn next to those who found ways to let their creative practice reclaim that force: Carolee Schneemann’s reworked film, scratched and painted by hand; Ghada Amer’s embroidered canvases, thread standing in for brushstroke; Ana Mendieta’s body pressed directly into earth; Louise Bourgeois’s late fabric works, old cloth mended and remade by hand; Mirabai’s ecstatic longing for the divine; and Audre Lorde’s insistence that the erotic is power, life force, and creative knowledge, never performance. Each found her own way back to what was hers, in a form no one had handed them.
Writer Hélène Cixous believed women’s desire had never been given a language of its own, only a borrowed one, and that writing through the body could invent what was missing. We take up the same permission with our hands. The form you need may not exist yet. Make it anyway.
That wild aliveness is uniquely yours.
Through an intuitive and layered, hands-on process, we move from spark to reclamation, and from reclamation to making. Longing and desire take form.
Bring it into being.
There will be images, conversation, time for reflection, making, and sharing.
This workshop offers a glimpse into what promises to be a deeper inquiry in 2027: The Eros Project.