Joshua Burraway is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection between social and political theory, cultural phenomenology, addiction medicine, and psychiatry. He is interested in how historical and structural forces shape different modes of subjectivity, in particular with regards to altered states of consciousness induced by psychoactive chemicals among homeless substance-users. ‘The Black Stuff’ and ‘The Sill’ are recent short stories he has written.
CIRCLINGS shows examples of a new book of drawings by Garry Kennard, which were prompted by the final lines of the last canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy. These words describe the vision that Dante experiences at end of his journey through hell, purgatory and paradise. They tell of his witnessing the creative power at the heart of creation. In this he sees a great circling of reflected spheres and rainbows and, somehow, the human image within it all. The article includes the preface by Paul Broks, clinical neuropsychologist-turned-writer.
Artist and writer, Richard Bright, has addressed the relationship between art, science and consciousness for over 30 years. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and was the recipient of the ‘Visions of Science’ Award, The Edge, Andrew Brownsward Gallery, University of Bath (Second Prize Winner). In ‘Vessels’ he shows some recent work from the series.
This piece of writing is an exploration of our interconnectedness with nature through the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. It interweaves poetry, art and the imaginal with neuroscience and depth psychology to explore our troubled relationship to the natural world and also to ourselves. It is written from the imagined viewpoint of a migratory bird that has become marginalised from the conscious mind but which appears conceptually in a dream. This is similar to how, collectively, inner environmental values of society might have become marginalised from outer agency. It proposes that by facilitating these inner depths through art, collective transformation and more pro-environmental behaviour may occur.
Keith Salmon is a British fine artist. His work is principally semi-abstract Scottish landscapes which are created based upon his experience as a hill walker. Even though he is registered blind Salmon has climbed more than one hundred of Scotland’s Munros, many of which have been captured in his artworks. His recent works move into the addition of sound to his paintings.
Steven Connor is Professor of English at the University of Cambridge. Since 2018 he has been Director of CRASSH. His areas of interest include magical thinking; the history of medicine; the cultural life of objects and the material imagination; the relations between culture and science; the philosophy of animals; and the body, sense and sexuality. He has also written on contemporary art for Cabinet, Tate Etc, Modern Painters and others. His essay, ‘Mutantis Mutandis’, is on the work of Annie Cattrell.
Grant Maxwell is the author of ‘The Dynamics of Transformation: Tracing an Emerging World View’, ‘How Does It Feel?: Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Philosophy of Rock and Roll’, and ‘Beyond Plato’s Cave’. He has served as a professor at Baruch College and Lehman College in New York, and he has written for the American Philosophical Association blog, American Songwriter magazine, and the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture.
“At this time, the world we live in is in great need of a balance between our heads and our hearts, so that we may connect to the ‘tap-root’ in us all by opening us to the realm of imagination, inspiration and integration.”
Sacha, Duchess of Abercorn OBE was an innovator in creative education and the founder of The Pushkin Trust, an organisation that supports creative learning and education across Ireland, works to provide and support a holistic model to spark imagination and deepen awareness of our collective creativity, our humanity and ‘the child’ within each one of us.
Sadly, Sacha died on 10 December 2018 and this interview, first published in the launch issue of Interalia Magazine, is re-published here as a tribute to her creativity, compassion and imagination.
Dustin Stokes is a philosopher at the University of Utah, having previously researched and taught at the Universities of Sussex and Toronto, in both philosophy and cognitive science. His research includes work on perception, imagination, and creative thought and behaviour. In this exclusive interview he discusses his ideas on creativity, imagination and philosophy.
Tom McLeish is Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics at the University of York specialising in soft matter, rheology and biological physics. He maintains a broad interdisciplinary research interests, and is a co-investigator in projects on medieval science, philosophy of emergence, social framing of science and technology, and theology of science. His book on the cultural position of science, “Faith and Wisdom in Science”, was published by OUP in 2014.