Edited by Judith Noble and Bernd-Christian Otto
RENSEP Research Dossier 1 (2026)
https://doi.org/10.61149/RLOH4590
Abstract: The inaugural RENSEP Research Dossier documents the outcomes of the first RENSEP Artist’s Award, launched in partnership with Arts University Plymouth. Established to support research through practice at the intersection of art and esotericism, the Award enabled artist Natasha Viosna Moody to develop Ghostwood, a site-sensitive body of work engaging ecology, magical consciousness, alchemy, material transformation, and the spectral memory of London’s fragmented Great North Wood.
Bringing together contributions by Judith Noble, Michelle Foot, Natasha Viosna Moody, and Stephen Felmingham, the dossier situates the Award within a wider resurgence of interest in esoteric and magical practices in contemporary art. It explores how artistic practice can function as a mode of esoteric research, how plant matter, glass, metal, light, writing, and performance can become vehicles for ecological and mythopoetic inquiry, and how the art school itself may be understood as a layered site of memory, place, and creative encounter. The dossier also includes an interview with Moody, offering a first-person account of her artistic process, her encounters with plants and landscapes, and her reflections on the relationship between artistic creation, esoteric practice, and other-than-human agencies.
At the centre of the dossier is Moody’s Becoming Ghostwood, a project that reimagines the remnants of the Great North Wood as a spectral and experiential landscape. Through fieldwork, material experimentation, myth-work, and performance, Moody investigates loss, renewal, more-than-human relations, and the possibility of transforming ecological grief into new forms of artistic and esoteric knowledge. Taken as a whole, the dossier reflects on the broader significance of the Artist’s Award for RENSEP’s mission: to foster dialogue between scholars, practitioners, artists, and institutions, and to advance the study of esoteric practices through collaborative, practice-based research.
Keywords: RENSEP, contemporary art, esotericism, ecology, alchemy, magical consciousness, occulture, artist-practitioner, research through practice
