Objects Embodied: Portals, Memory & Meaning with Lyn Swett Miller
Objects Embodied: Portals, Memory & Meaning with Lyn Swett Miller
April 22 - May 27, 2025
Meets every Tuesday from 12:30 pm - 2:30 pm via Zoom for 6 weeks.
How can objects offer portals to memory and meaning? How can photography help us make sense of the energy embodied in our stuff?
In this six-week practice group, we will explore our relationship to elemental air as experienced in the things surrounding us. Air, as it exists between bodies, carries ancient energy. In the spirit of creating positive flows in our lives, how might paying attention to the objects that surround us offer opportunities to explore what memories, and therefore emotions, objects contain or evoke? How is it that some objects literally change the energy in a room? And in what ways might particular objects offer portals to elemental states of mind and being?
Each week, we will explore different aspects of the energy and memories contained in everyday things, whether a favorite spoon, an heirloom from a grandparent, or a childhood diary. Weekly activities will include portrait sessions, taking objects for walks, and having objects be in conversation with each other. This will be a highly collaborative practice group grounded in personal experience. There will be time for individual sharing and group discussion as we unpack how the earth’s energy and spirit flows from and through the material world. During our time together, participants will co-create an annotated version of Elementals, ii. Air, exploring the possibilities for shifting the energy of a particular object by playing with it together.
During Fire, Water and Earth the Objects Embodied practice groups will build on this initial investigation, going deeper into memory and meaning as our elemental year progresses.
This practice group is for all levels of photographers but will be more focused on conceptual questions than technical issues.
Kinship uses a pay-what-you-can honor system with a minimum donation or $50. The average contribution for a six-week practice group is $125. Please give as generously as you can. If you cannot afford the minimum contribution of $50 please don't hesitate to request a scholarship.
Lyn Swett Miller is a micro-climate photographer, essayist and motivational speaker living in Vermont. Her work explores the power of transformation and renewal as experienced in a compost pile and the landfill as well as with books decomposing in her garden. Lyn is currently working on a limited edition book, In the Garden Library. A member of the Kinship community for two years, Lyn facilitated the Re-Imagining Loss & Grief Practice Group in 2024 and is excited to collaborate more with her kin in 2025
