The Art of Springtime: Its Myth, Metaphor and Meaning

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"We need metaphor and myths in order to understand the world…they are not dispensable luxuries or "optional extras", but are fundamental in the process… and art can play a role in helping us to convey spiritual meaning" Dr Iain McGilchrist

In this workshop we will explore myth, metaphor and meaning in great art which embodies the notion of Spring. This season in our cycle is a symbolic renewal and rebirth, a renaissance in itself, as well as a physical re-awakening of the dormant matter and fabric of the earth. Art is one of the most powerful visual forms of myth; it is through the absorption of myth, of story, that the importance of our words are resurrected and it is through our attention to noticing and seeing what is before and around us, which transforms perceptions.

When myth and art are considered together, metaphor becomes a way of understanding, which honours both the physical world and that which we cannot see. From ancient Greece through to Christianity, Spring has been a time of the divine feminine flowering forth. The figures of Aphrodite, Sophia, Persephone, Mary, Gaia and the visual representations of sacred gardens, flowers and animals both symbolise and are the manifestations of an archetypal force in the cosmos. We will explore a visual, vibrant feast of Spring in the form of images, from antiquity, to the Renaissance and into the Victorian era.

You will discover that it is in your notion of moving between different modes of seeing and understanding, mediated by the imagination, that gleans a full embrace of myth and metaphor, re-visioning your ideas of self and the personal in a broader framework of meaning.