The Motherlode: Sacred Economics
Beginnings
The Motherlode began its first outward phase in November 2024, thirteen moon cycles ago. Before this, the project was seeded in a personal and systemic question: “How do I walk alongside my daughter in a way that serves her and our wider family system?” I won’t share her story, but the question matters - it sits at the heart of this work: listening for what cannot yet be said, sensing the postures, patterns and repetitions that shape who we become.
For over thirteen years, I have worked as a systemic constellations practitioner, exploring ancestral, relational, and ecological systems. Alongside this, since COVID, my artistic practice has grown - poetry, image-making, and the arrival of ‘imaginings’ when questions are spoken aloud. Out of this most recent inquiry emerged a simple invitation: to speak with 100 people about the stories of their maternal ancestors, and of those who stepped into mothering roles across generations.
This shift - from a personal question to a collective exploration - felt natural. When an idea is spoken, the right people gather. Their stories connect to something in themselves as much as to the work.
The project formally began with three interviews in November and December 2024. It quickly became clear that holding these deep one-to-one conversations required a wider container - an invisible collective field that could support the scale and sensitivity of the stories being shared. To create that holding, I invited two artists, Moi Tu and Amy Isles Freeman, to collaborate as part of the project’s creative and custodial team.
Collaborative partnerships
My collaboration with Moi began in 2024 through a shared interest in facilitation, creativity and the tender spaces where grief meets imagination. Our conversations evolved naturally into a way of working together, and from this emerged the practice of offering a 15-minute creative reflection at the end of each interview. This simple ritual - writing, drawing or any form of expression - created space for wisdom to surface beyond words, allowing both storyteller and listener to breathe, settle and see differently.
At the same time, I sensed the need for a dedicated space at home that could hold these stories with more spaciousness and care. I invited artist Amy Isles Freeman to create a mural that would act as both a physical and energetic container for the work. Over six days of conversation and painting, Amy shaped a ritual space filled with movement - sun and moon, birds, flowers, and an unbroken motherline flowing around the room. The artwork brings lightness, joy and a sense of continuity, softening the edges of the difficult histories that often arise in this project.
Together, these collaborations formed two complementary structures: with Moi, a shared process that supports the emergence of insight through creative dialogue; with Amy, an environment that holds the ancestral, emotional and imaginative weight of the stories. One shapes the relational field, the other the physical and symbolic space - both essential to how The Motherlode unfolds.
The Conversations & the sacred economy of exchange
These conversations form an exchange of tender ancestral inquiry. What began with friends has widened into a global circle, with people joining us online and, at times, in our home. Some participants have chosen to contribute financially as an act of reciprocity - honouring the time, skill and care held within the process.
To date, we have completed 33 interviews. Each one requires significant preparation, aftercare, writing, creative exploration, participant outreach and collaboration. Moi’s work translating interviews into visual forms, alongside my own writing, listening and processing, is both time-intensive and essential. We have also invested in mentoring to help shape and understand the creative insights emerging from the project.
In June 2025, recognising the depth and longevity of this work, we explored a crowdfunding campaign with Holly Tarquini. Over the summer, as we paused and rotated roles within the creative process, a kind of stuckness emerged - one that ultimately clarified our direction. We realised that the project is not suited to a short-term crowdfunder tied to a fixed outcome. Instead, it requires a steady, ongoing invitation into shared support.
As a result, Moi and I agreed that I will focus on completing the 100 interviews, and that our funding approach will be open, continuous and woven into the practice itself. We are now inviting the remaining 60 interviewees to join this sacred storytelling process within a sacred economy: we offer our time, presence and deep listening; you offer your stories. Together, we create something none of us could see alone - a thread of love or insight that may ripple outward in ways we cannot predict.
Often, creative responses arise naturally in participants after the conversation, and these stories tend to stay with people, travelling into unexpected inner and outer places.
All interviews remain private. The work we create draws from shared themes rather than individual narratives. If a specific strand relates clearly to one person, we will always seek consent before including anything identifiable. The emphasis is on collective wisdom, not personal testimony.
A Simple Explanation of Gift Economy
A gift economy moves in circles rather than straight lines. What is offered here is not transactional. I give my time to listen deeply to one person, and someone else - moved by the work - may choose to support it. Later, that generosity may return to you from an entirely different place.
This way of giving breaks the usual exchange of “I pay, you deliver.” Instead, it invites trust in the wider field. You offer what you can, when you can, and together we keep the work alive.
More writing on the nuances of gift economy will be available soon on this blog, alongside shared resources from other practitioners.
Gift Economy
You follow our work, you read the words, the reflections, the creative framing - and you want to support it simply because it speaks to you. Wonderful.
You can offer a financial gift through Stripe, Apple Pay, Klarna or Link. Every contribution supports the substantial behind-the-scenes work of each conversation, which takes around a day of listening, processing and creative care.
Shared Economy
You love the work and would also like something tangible in return.
And soon, you’ll be able to buy spoken-word poems and meditations that deepen the understanding of this embodied, systemic and ancestral inquiry.
Abundant Economy
This is an invitation into a deeper financial relationship with the project. Our sacred contract with the creative field is to complete 100 conversations and to follow whatever wants to emerge from them. Larger donations allow us to dedicate more time to research, analysis and writing, and to follow the “side quests” that call to us - sound, music, extended artistic forms, or other yet-unseen pathways.
This is why we speak of sacred economics. The work is relational; it unfolds across time and through people. We listen to stories, to insights, to the creative forces that shape artistic work, and to what these questions - personal and collective - want to move within us.
This is where hope lives.
In understanding what is happening and why, and in cultivating a worldview that reveals our deep interconnection - with ourselves, our ancestors, the lands that shaped us, and the journeys that brought us here. In this remembering, we grow our capacity to care, to love, to make peace with the past and to imagine the many futures our children may inhabit, even as our planetary systems strain and shift.
Life continues. Humans have survived profound thresholds before. We may yet survive many more - with good fortune, a little luck, and a generous measure of community and creative practice.
Conclusion & Invitation
The Motherlode is growing into a body of work that none of us can yet fully see, but all of us are shaping. Each conversation, each story, each piece of creative response is part of a wider lineage of remembering - a return to what love, ancestry and imagination can reveal when we slow down enough to listen.
If you feel moved by this work, by its intention, or by the possibility of what it may become, you are warmly invited to support it in whatever way feels right to you. There is no obligation. There is no required exchange. Your contribution - whether financial, creative, or simply your presence in reading this - helps us bring this work further into the world.
We are continuing towards 100 interviews, weaving together the wisdom that emerges between us: the pieces of story that cannot be held alone, the insights that travel, the threads that want to be carried forward. Your support allows us to dedicate the time, energy and creative attention needed to honour this process with the depth and care it requires.
If this work touches something in you - an ancestor, a question, a longing, a possibility - and you wish to help it grow, we welcome you into this shared field of sacred economy.
Book the gift of a 90 minute conversation about your motherlines here.
Support The Motherlode here.
Support The Motherlode and recieve artworks here.
Together, we are tending something larger than any one of us:
a quiet, steady act of remembering,
a practice of connection and creative kinship,
and a hopeful thread carried forward into the futures our children will inherit.
Thank you for walking alongside us.
