Rituals (2024)

- A5 zine (edition of 100)

For most of us, the word ritual will be used to describe ceremonies that hold religious or cultural significance, which are performed to mark a rite of passage or a special occasion. But the ordinary actions we carry out everyday, like eating and washing, are all rituals too.

Some rituals will take place so often that they can go unnoticed and are taken for granted. However, this does not mean that they are not important to us. 

How we perform our daily rituals is how we create meaning in our lives. Your way of doing these actions will feel perfectly natural and normal, until compared with how someone else does the same task differently. The people we do them with, can be as important as the places that they happen in, or the items we use to perform them.

This work was made during a short residency in the Riso Lab of the Fine Art Department at Sunderland University in May 2024.

The aim of the publication is to create space for us to stop and reflect on the activity that we carry out on a daily basis. Actions that feel completely natural and therefore go unchallenged in our lives. Why do we do the things we do and why are they important to us?

The project is dedicated to Christopher Martyn Lloyd (1941 – 2024).

I would like to thank Fiona Larkin, Graham Mitchinson, Victoria Doyle and the Fine Art Students at Sunderland University for their support in making this work.

Copies of the zine are available to buy from NewBridge Books.

Prints from the zine were exhibited as part of THE NEWBRIDGE ‘OPEN’ OPEN at the NewBridge Project (21 September – 9 November 2024).

Install photographs by Matt Denham.

Photographs taken of the Riso Lab at Sunderland University during the residency.