Dates: Fridays, November 11 through December 30
Time: 6 - 7 pm ET (5:45 - 7:30 pm for intros and follow-up discussion)
Admission: $15 single session (no max or min)

Please note: We won’t be recording the sessions, but the audio from the reading and meditation will be provided to everyone, regardless of if you’re able to attend live.

Are you looking to expand your relationship with creativity? Have you found yourself drawn to increasingly mysterious sources of inspiration? Do you have a sneaking suspicion that community is missing in your art practice?

If so, you are not alone.

Humans are deeply, inherently social channels of creativity. Art-making requires us to reach deep within ourselves - but it also invites us to reach outward to others not just as performance but as practice. For our ancient ancestors who painted on cave walls, there were few things done alone, so perhaps painting together was just the way things were. For priests and priestesses from across the planet, making ensouled objects and singing sacred songs together passed down techniques and topics to new generations. For artists like Hilma af Klint and her seance circle The Five, connecting was a source of not just inspiration, but instruction for future work.

For me, the group format brings new ideas, accountability and regularity to my art-making. And of course, in all of these cases, I’m not just talking about connecting with other living humans. Throughout the ages, people have connected beyond the living world into vast reaches of our experience when making art: to plants and animals, to aliens and outer space, to our own cells and unconscious, to the divine and to the dead.

With the support of Morbid Anatomy, I’m putting together a place and time for us to connect and make art each week.

We will use a circle format, which means we’re all participants and each meeting is a commitment to showing up for our expression and each other. Our meetings will be on Zoom, which tends to create more of a web-like interaction.

Each week I’ll take us through a group version of my Mediumship for Creativity mediational practice, which allows for a shift from the typical day-to-day mind into a state of receptivity. The time will be broken into sections: we’ll open up the Zoom room 15 minutes before our scheduled time, in case you want to socialize a bit. We’ll start with a short reading to focus the mind followed by a guided meditation to energize the connection. We’ll have about 45 minutes of quiet time to make art individually in our own spaces (you’re encouraged to gather with those in your local area, if you feel so inclined). Then I’ll close down the circle and those who want to can stay on for another 15 minutes or so to chat about the experience and share what we’ve made.

I recommend you bring whatever art form is most natural to you and stick to what can be done simply. You are not limited to drawing - writing, music, dance, cooking, whatever form is best for you to bring out what you have inside. In order to connect and stay connected you don’t want to be thinking too much about what you’re doing. I’ve found that these types of sessions help to create flow, bring in new ideas and get lost stuff out. I’ve found less often that a magnum opus comes out when connected - the real work still awaits you.

We won’t be recording the sessions, but the audio from the reading and meditation will be provided to everyone, regardless of if you’re able to attend live.

Tiffany J. Hopkins (she/her) began studying mediumship after moving into her great-great grandmother's cottage in Lily Dale, the world's largest community of Spiritualists. During the pandemic she developed a curriculum to share her process of mediumship for creativity and this series is an evolution to bring in a larger community of artists and mystics. She is a practicing medium, educator, freelance futurist and she’d like you to join her over at Normalize Talking to the Dead.

Image: Hilma af Klint, The Evolution, No. 10, 1908