An Elemental Year: Photography, Ritual, and Magic with Susan Patrice
An Elemental Year: Photography, Ritual, and Magic with Susan Patrice
Spring: Air — April 22 - June 10, 2025
This Group is Full.
Group size: 6
The Elemental Year is a recurring seasonal practice group that draws creative inspiration from land-based cultures—where time moves in non-linear rhythms with the Earth and travels in a circle. During this practice group, we will utilize the power of embodied seasonal rituals, contemplative practices, and deep reflection to explore our fundamental relationship to our elemental kin. Participants are invited to follow their creative intuition through one season or all four. Each photographer will be encouraged to create or adapt practices and rituals that align with their personal rhythms, beliefs, and processes. Together, we will ponder whether slow-photography can awaken new levels of curiosity, wonder, and magic while inspiring new ways of seeing and being kin. Together, we might even create a photographer’s wheel-of-the-year and share our discoveries with the Kinship community.
Spring: Air
Air is both unutterably old and as fresh as our next breath. In some earth-based cultures, spring is celebrated alongside the element of air and is considered a time of renewal and rebirth. We will start this spring exploration of air (or fall exploration of air for those in the southern hemisphere) by contemplating the breath and its impact on the senses. Then, week by week, we will follow the group's ponderings, wanderings, and experiences into a new shared territory as we unfold this practice together.
If you are interested in this practice group and cannot attend Thursday evenings, we are open to adding a mid-day group. If interested, please email info@kinship.photography.
Kinship uses a pay-what-you-can honor system. This eight-session practice group requires a minimum donation of $60. The average contribution for an eight-session practice group is $150. Please give as generously as you can. If you cannot afford the minimum contribution of $60, please don't hesitate to request a scholarship.
Susan Patrice is a documentary photographer, contemplative artist, and creativity coach. Over the last twenty years, she has worked with hundreds of creatives, drawing on a vast and diverse collection of resources gathered from her love of interdisciplinary studies. She lives in Cumberland, MD, where she is the director of Makers Circle and a co-founder of the Kinship Photography Collective.
Since 2016, her photographic work has explored the power of visual perception and its impact on feelings of connection and kinship. Through the use of handmade cameras built in response to the places she photographs, she engages in deep conversation with the land. Her most recent project, The Land of My Body, combines her work as a documentary photographer and citizen artist and explores her family’s Celtic ancestry alongside a multigenerational legacy of trauma. Susan’s work celebrates the power of photography to transform and reimagine the past, present, and future.
