Willow Aislinn Ro 

I am Willow Aislinn Ro (they / them) and I work as a Cneasaí, an Irish word  meaning "being with skin" and evokes a sense of healing by drawing forth scaring. This is gentle work that is rooted in deep embodied listening and companionship with the body and the land.

www.willowbywater.com

Alexandra Derwen 

I am Alexandra Derwen (they / them) and I live in Eryri (Snowdonia), I am a death and grief doula, keener & lamenter, ceremonialist, poet, pilgrim and community educator.

My near distance ancestral roots come through Liverpool but are woven of Celtic and pre-Celtic diaspora (Irish, Scots and Welsh) reaching further back to Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea. I am part Oak, part Rock and lover of rivers.

My dream for this world is that we collectively mourn all that is dead and dying; in order to midwife a new world, together.

Rachel Hawthorn 

I am Rachel Hawthorn (she / her), an artist, death doula, and shroud maker.

I have roots in English and Scottish soil. I grew up in London but always felt pulled north, and now live in the wooded valleys of West Yorkshire.

My wish for this world is that we recover our deep belonging and intimacy with nature and land, and come back into reciprocity and kinship with the more-than-human world.

Kestrel Morton

Kestrel Morton (they / them) is a queer, non-binary storyteller based in South Wales and usually found bewitching audiences with spiderweb tales spun from the echoes of the wild, blurring reality with myth and drawing the otherworld close. They've performed on stages and at festivals across the UK including at Brighton Fringe, Sidmouth Folk Festival, the Scottish International Storytelling Festival and Beyond the Border, most recently touring their show Binderella with The Ragged Storytelling Collective. 

Gauri Raje  

Tuomas Rounakari

I am Tuomas Rounakari (he/him), violinist, composer and ethnomusicologist and have worked over 25 years revitalizing, reclaiming and re-imagining lament traditions.

I am a descendent of two lines, east and west. My fatherline were sea-farers from the west coast of Finland and my motherline goes to Karelia and Ingria, parts in the east of Finland lost to Russia in WW2. The forced displacement of my grandparents has shaped my life in unexpected ways. It might well be the reason behind my interest in revitalizing Karelian lament traditions first with the diaspora in Finland, then abroad aligning with universal lament practices.

I live on the North-West coast of Finland. I have a special bond with the sea and thunder. I dream of a world where our common standpoint is we rather than I and them. 

Lies Verswijvel

My name is Lies Verswijvel (she/her): writer, artist, death doula, traveller, and facilitator whose work draws from the well of imagination, be/longing, and impermanence. I practice art and end-of-life work as forms of cultural tending, creating experiences where presence can be cultivated and the tender and shadowed parts of life welcomed and held.

I come from Belgium but, drawn to Celtic heritage, am currently living as an artist in residence at La Source, Centre for Research and Creation in Bretagne, France. Here, as an apprentice to the land, I am developing The Ecology of Endings, a process-based art and research project that explores how sustained engagement with ecological endings can teach us about presence and help reframe cultural narratives around care in relation to death, grief, and crisis.

My dream for this world is a remembering of our place within the living earth: to decentre ourselves as the gravity of importance and return to ways of living where embodied listening to place and the more-than-human world brings us back into relationship with humility, finding vocation rooted in radical love.

Heulwen Williams