Reflections from The Red Tent
As I begin to shape the Red Tent, a new art studio space nestled above the barn at Woodland Ways, I find myself thinking more and more about the weight of inheritance. This blog is one of many I will be writing, exploring the space and the ethos as it takes form, based in two rooms of warmth, incense, oak beams and artefacts, holding the spirit of women’s work across time.
The Red Tent runs parallel to the World of Bushcraft below but stands in a different current. One that flows with female energy, memory, and ritual.
The work of assembling this space has stirred up many things from my past. Alongside taking it on, I have recently moved to Birchover, just minutes from the barn and many items that had been stored away have been brought into the light. It’s brought to the surface certain objects I kept from my grandparents when they died, both within six weeks of one another at the end of the Covid pandemic, after over 60 years of marriage.
Among the objects that came to the surface were a bundle of old table linens and doilies, an old wooden sewing box and a tin of my grandfathers farming overall buttons labelled simply in my grandmother’s distinctive, beautiful handwriting. It’s these things, the worn, the used, the lovingly stored that make me feel closest to them. It’s the human things, the quiet relics of ordinary lives, that carry the most weight.
The linens were a mystery to me for some time. I chose them because they were beautiful and connected. They belonged to a way of life that barely exists anymore. A time where people gathered for meals laid out on starched and skillfully embroidered cloth, and women spent their evenings stitching by firelight. They speak of pride, skill, inheritance, and care. I couldn’t bring myself to let them go, but I didn’t know what to do with them either, until now.
I decided that they needed a strong new lease of life. And so, I chose to dye them red, the colour of blood and birth and the cycles of women and hang them as a curtain within the Red Tent. Not to close the space off in shame or secrecy, but to create a veil, a soft boundary that honours intimacy. A gentler kind of door. These linens, now saturated in colour, will be the first thing anyone sees when they enter. A quiet statement of beauty, strength, and womanhood.
It’s only recently that I’ve come to appreciate the significance of textiles in women’s history. As a teenager, I struggled to see the point of conceptual arts. Installations, unmade beds, stitched confessions all lost on me. But age shifts your sight. Tracey Emin’s work, for instance, particularly her textile pieces, now speaks to me in ways I couldn’t have imagined at eighteen. Textiles are women’s voices, sewn in thread. When history ignores their stories, the cloth remembers.
This act of making of dyeing inherited linens and hanging them with intention feels, in its own way, like ancestor worship. But not in the romanticised, far-off way we often see in popular culture. There’s a real trend now, especially in tattooing, for people to claim Viking heritage or draw heavily on Norse or pagan symbolism to connect to something ancient. That desire to belong to a people, a mythic past, is understandable. But it often comes with a kind of selective blindness. Statistically, if you go back ten generations, you have over a thousand direct ancestors. Go back to the era of the Vikings and you’re looking at thousands more, meaning we all come from everywhere and everyone.
People cling to imagined roots, while barely speaking of their own recent dead. That dissonance troubles me. We honour long-dead warriors but forget the ones who raised us. We revere ancestors we’ve never met while our elders sit alone in care homes, their stories unopened. And we shy away from grief, from speaking the names of the dead, from weaving their memory into the fabric of our daily lives.
In my own various avenues of work as an artist, tattooist, a celebrant and as a bushcraft apprentice I try to resist that forgetting. In the immediate aftermath of my grandparents' deaths, I painted portraits of them, to sit at the front of the chapel at their services… Services that I could not assemble and which in many ways failed to reflect them. But I hoped the paintings went some way towards addressing that.
We are conditioned not to dwell on death. We warehouse the elderly, push grief into silence, and decorate it only when it is ancient enough to feel comfortable. But I believe in ancestor worship that begins with the ones we knew. The hands that held ours, the voices we can still hear if we try.
In Kenya, where I was lucky enough to visit this February as part of the Masaai Warrior expedition, I saw a different relationship with elders, a deeper respect woven into daily life. The elderly weren’t burdens. They were repositories of wisdom. Living ancestors. That cultural contrast stirred something in me. It reminded me that reverence is a choice and a practice.
When I painted portraits of my grandparents after they died, it wasn’t to capture them as they were. It was to stay in conversation and to honour them by making something with my hands. It felt like a sacred act.
This isn’t just grief work, it's soul work and a call to remember who we come from. Not just the mythic dead, but the ones whose breath once warmed the same rooms we now live in.
In The Red Tent, the dead are welcome. Their faces are on the walls, their names are whispered into the grain of the wood, their initials are in the corners of cloth, their treasured items hold incense on the altar. They do not haunt the space, they hold it.
This is something that I will continue to consider, across all that I do. It is how I wish to spend my life. Honouring the people and path that brought me to this time and place.
Bushcraft, too, is an act of remembering. Every carved spoon, every fire lit from flint and steel, carries echoes of those who came before. Our hands repeat movements passed down through unspoken lineages, gestures shaped by necessity, by care and by love. When we walk through the forest with attention, when we craft things with reverence, when we build or tend or gather with presence, we are not just surviving, we are honouring.
To strike flint is to say, I remember.
To carve a spoon is to say, you taught me to shape things gently.
To light a fire, I see you.
To hold grief is to say, you mattered.
This is ancestor worship. In a world that forgets.
