The collaborative workshop brought a group of participants together, descending the cliff steps across sand and rocks to the cove at Polhawn Fort, where they created a collective mandala.

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MEDUSA'S MANDALA
The creative process of mandala-making draws upon imagination and interaction. It involves an externalisation of inner thoughts and the unconscious through mark-making, arranging, and visual communication towards forming a path to self-understanding. As such, the mandala becomes a symbol of ‘wholeness’, integrating all elements, reflected in its circular form.

 

The transformative capacity of participation was at the core of this collaborative act of creating the collective mandala, bringing together different perspectives, experiences and ideas.

 

Like Medusa and her snakes, the mandala was created from natural materials found in the surrounding landscape. Her shape-shifting myth, firmly embedded in the collective imagination, provided a foundation and inspiration.

 

Working against the tidal window of this site-specific work, the group began with a gathering of materials: comprising driftwood, stones and shingle from the beach, alongside seaweed and flotsam from the sea. The sand underfoot provided both ‘canvas and medium’ for this temporary image, anchoring the artwork in time and place.

 

The mandala composition was not conceived beforehand. Placement and scale were guided by the site, the group and time. Together with the circular boundary, these constraints formed a framework to explore creative possibility and bring the work into being. The evolving assemblage was intuitive, responding to the place, materials, and each participant's own relationship to the theme. Initial arrangements emerged, and were reorganised in a collaborative response to symmetry, patterns, line and texture. Some of the seaweed snakes were entwined into the design, while others remained outside the mandala, as guardians of the shoreline. 

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Time and movement were a constant drumbeat in the ritual, with bodies moving collectively and interactively through the site, enacting and imagining the mandala form. The process was convivial, with words spoken at times, as well as spontaneous silences honouring and reflecting the imminent arrival of the tide and its response, which no one could predict.

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RETURNING TO THE SEA
The final stage of the work was its return to the sea. The gatherings, making and synthesis were destined to culminate in this dismantling and disintegration.

 

For each participant, the seaweed snakes provided a unique amulet imbibed with personal meaning, which many subsequently gifted as part of the collective ceremonial mandala art work at the beach. Others ceremonially threw their individual snake directly into the waves to be submerged by the sea, a symbol of the unconscious and “mother of all that lives.” ¹

 

As the waves dislodged, lifted and reclaimed the mandala, participants watched collectively in silent contemplation, witnessing the transformation. The coloured snakes could be seen for a time, forming patterns against the waves, clearly visible to the naked eye. Some watched from the clifftop and photographed the spectacle from above for posterity. The ritual concluded once all Medusa’s snakes had ‘returned’ to the sea, taking with them messages from those present.  The next day the beach was devoid of any trace of the site-specific enactment, the legacy living on through retellings such as this, through personal and group reflections, and the internal dialogues of those who took part.

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REFLECTION
The mandala and ritual aimed to create a space where the duality of opposites, noted at the outset, could temporarily coexist outside the absolutes of the external world. The process of gathering, integrating and decomposing here corresponds to the cyclical sequence of alchemical transformation and its path through symbolic destruction towards balance, renewal and reconnection.