This grief pilgrimage is not about fixing grief or getting over it; it is about engaging with it, sitting with it, and expressing it through our hands in doll making, and through the voice and body.
Keening Doll
A keening doll is not just a decorative object; it is something you make with your hands and soul. It is a prayer to your grief as you select materials, stitch and felt, this way the doll becomes a vessel, a place where lament and love, tears and tenderness are welcomed, and the doll becomes a figure which holds feelings that sometimes words cannot.
Radical Doll Making
Doll making is a radical art, an ancient tradition which can trace its roots back to figurines such as the Women of Willendorf, who is approximately 25,000 to 30,000 years old.
Your keening doll will most likely hold the same intentions that some of your most ancient foremothers placed into their dolls, hopes and intentions, sorrows and prayers. While we have many stone and clay figurines which survived, there was thousands upon thousands of bone and fur, blood and bone, twig and stone creations which didn’t survive. Perhaps part of their magic was that they were scattered by rain, and dispersed by the wind.
Liminal Space
Dolls are born out of both worlds. Making a doll brings you into a liminal space, a place our ancestors visited, a place of collective memory.
In this ritual, we are stepping onto an ancestral path, a place of collective memory, where the doll may come to embody a particular message that has appeared to people through symbol and story over thousands of years, a message that is always relevant, always powerful, always needed.
The Ritual of Doll Making
You do not need to be ‘good at art’, as this is a process you can learn, step by step and you will be guided through the process. You only need a willingness to honour your grief, to listen to it and learn from it.
You will engage with several steps of ritual in making your doll, such as:
A guided journey to meet your doll before you begin Creating intention as you gather your materials
A blessing of your doll once the body is formed
Creating a meaningful symbol to be felted onto the body of your doll
Honouring who and what you are honouring in this grief ritual
An invitation to incorporate some cloth from clothing from someone special (or using their jewellery)
Slow stitching as prayer
Using natural items as embellishments and talismans
Use of a shroud
Gather the Keeners is a week-long sacred grief pilgrimage on the Isle of Eigg (Eilean nan Ban Mòra — the Isle of the Big Women), inviting participants to reclaim grief as a vital, communal, and transformative practice.
Rooted in the ancient tradition of keening, this pilgrimage weaves together story, art, ritual, walking the land, and collective mourning to create a living grief practice for our time. Rather than avoiding grief, we meet it directly as it is, an expression of love, a form of remembrance, and an act of resistance in a grief-phobic, death-denying culture.