In March 2024, during the brief time between the Spring Equinox and that month's full moon, the Worm Moon, women gathered together with artist Seyi Adelekun and sound recordist Madison Carter in Idle Women's allotment in Accrington. The Worm Moon gets its name from the earthworms that wriggle up through layers of soil and clay at this time in the year aerating the soil as they move and welcoming in spring. Seyi lead the women in a meditation on this precise time of the year, connecting them to soil, and to each other.
The artist invites you to download this meditation to your phone and then go outside, find somewhere you can connect with the ground, remove your shoes, and listen. You can select the full version to hear the meditation performed by Seyi and the women that gathered together in March 2024, or simply listen to the meditation itself (short version). You can also listen on this page using the audio or video players above (full version). The video includes burned-in captions and allows you to scrub through the work.
Download full version (43:15)
Download meditation only (short version) (16:25)
It's getting darker now. And here before we hit the parent rock, the broken rock of the land underneath the earth, we see in the darkness these balls of life. They're wrapped around themselves and they're worms in their burrows. They're deep asleep. They've been hibernating all winter, waiting for the frost to clear and spring to come. And today, it's arrived.
Seyi Adelekun is a London-based multidisciplinary artist with Yoruba-Nigerian heritage. Their practice focuses on creating sites rooted in deep ecology and nature’s spiritual wisdom, with the aim to foster interconnectedness, ecological awareness and environmental stewardship. Seyi’s work centres indigenous knowledge through embodied practices including somatic movement, rituals, and bio-material craft. Creating installations, performance art and facilitating workshops that embrace ancestral connections with the more-than-human world and collectively cultivate spaces for deep listening and healing, especially for global majority communities.
They have created sustainable architectural interventions, including Plastic Pavilion exhibited at the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail (2021), Great Exhibition Road Festival and South London Gallery; The Diaspora Garden: Watering Connections (2023) at the South London Gallery, Algae Meadow in collaboration with Wayward for The South Ken Green Trail (2021). They have facilitated workshops at The Barbican and performed internationally during their residency at G.A.S Foundation, Nigeria. They are one of artist in residence at 32° East for KLA ART ’24 festival in Kampala Uganda, and Assemble studio developing House of Annetta a social centre for land justice.
Madison Carter is a sound recordist and audio engineer based in Manchester. She worked in live sound and events before discovering a passion for storytelling. She says this of her medium: "sound has the ability to envelop us in a world that may not even exist, immerse us in a moment in time that we never experienced, or guide us through an emotional journey that can connect us to others. Sounds can ground us, connect us, and teach us about our world, yet it is often unnoticed."
Seyi Adelekun
📸 @seyi_adelekun
📧 seyiadelekun@hotmail.co.uk
Madison Carter
📸 @madisoncartersound
🌐 LinkedIn / IMDB
Photograph: (previous page) Darlyne Komukama