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Your Guide

Jude has been visiting the Isle of Eigg for over 25 years, forming deep connections with both the land and the island community. As an artist and writer with a background in Human Ecology her work explores the intersection of story, art and ritual can nurture a strong relationship with place, and also provide a map to our grieving process.

Reclaiming keening is inspired an age-old old indigenous grief ritual. Jude’s approach is taking the threads of the keening woman’s ritual and exploring them in dedicated keening circles. Over time these separate rituals can be woven together to create a keening circle which helps make space for, explore and transform grief.

Reclaiming keening isn’t a practice just using the voice, it also employs art projects such as doll making or weaving. As a doll maker her work through dolls connects to the Ancestral Mothers of Scotland, as well as the process of doll making providing healing and ways to express our grief symbolically.

Reclaiming Keening is also an act of resistance. Patriarchy thrives on control, which includes the control of grief through limiting how emotions are expressed, the medicalisation of death, and the loss of communal mourning. When grief is silenced it becomes a tool of social control. To reclaim grief is a form of activism. It allows us to reconnect with indigenous grief traditions, to normalise grief as part of life, and to challenge the stigma around emotional expression.

She gained her MSc Masters Degree in Human Ecology at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow and lives on the West Coast of Scotland on the banks of the River Clyde, near Loch Lomond. She is currently writing her first book, Walking the Path of the Ancestral Mothers.