May is here and full of the joys of Spring.

Here at The Earth Sea Love Podcast, we’re full of joy to bring you this conversation with the wonderful Lateisha Divine Lovelace-Hanson.

Lateisha is a Black queer feminist interdisciplinary artist and social-justice practitioner/community-healing organiser of Jamaican heritage based in London.

Within this episode with your host Dr. Sheree Mack, Lateisha talks about:

* focusing on how we feel instead of what we want

* water connections and healings

* community land trusts

* listening and asking questions

* who do you be instead of what do you do?

* creating healing spaces for community

* having the purpose of staying alive

* trauma living in the body

* being in right relationship with ourselves and nature

* revolution and liberation = community

* rest and safety

* grieving and nature

* our ancestors’ relationships to water and the land and recognising

* making spaces for joy and play in nature

* how we repair and heal what colonialism has done and been doing

* bringing our words into the word takes time and creative fugitivity

* doing the work to unshame self

* burn out can teach us many things

* “we’re gonna be alright!” x

Bio:

Lateisha Divine Lovelace-Hanson is a Black queer feminist interdisciplinary artist and social-justice practitioner/community-healing organiser of Jamaican heritage based in London. Their writing, art-making, facilitation, consultancy and nature-work practices are tools to creatively embody knowledges that interrupt ongoing systems of colonial-imperial oppression(s), in order to activate spaces for deep healing. In their practice they meditate + dream upon what it means to be well?

To connect, belong and love freely.

Their transformative lived experiences of gender, race, class, survivorship, neurodivergence and illness inform their offerings and approaches – being drawn to the revolutionary possibilities of sci-fi / eco-futurism, magic + ritual + ceremony and communal gathering-archiving as ancestral pathways and political strategies to reimagine resistance and remember revolutionary possibilities for the new world in creation.

Lateisha is currently working on their debut poetry pamphlet, ~the heart is a holding~  supported by Rotterdam residences: International Collaborative Urban art projects  / Foundation B.a.d and published by Burning Eye Books Autumn 2023. They are also developing their interdisciplinary performance – installation work s/he breathe/s,  supported by Raze Collective, Stanley Arts and Arts Council England showing in Summer 2023. You can also visit their current work Meeting At The Altar Of Us, a collaborative text and sound work offering as part of Bloom Collective’s contributions to Meera Shakti Osborne’s department of Unruly histories archive and exhibition at Cubitt in spring 2023.

Previous work includes An Offering // an installation of a world-building, to come- back to home…  weaving poetry-film, sound, documentary, text, and plant medicine portals. Commissioned residency and exhibition by Bethlem Gallery: An Ecology Of Mind (2022). Lateisha has written extensively through residencies and commissions, including  Camden Art Centre: The Botanical Mind, Wretched Of The Earth (BIPOC climate justice collective), [Performance space]: PSX 10, Live Art Development Agency, Artsadmin: Apocalypse Reading Room curated by Ama Josephine Budge, Chelsea Physic Garden: Queer Botany, Apples & Snakes, She Grrrowls, Dada Fest / Yewande 103 and is a Roundhouse and Hammer & Tongue Poetry Slam Finalist.

Lateisha facilitates community-healing workshops and activity-based immersive installations across art, education and community spaces. Including, Queer Youth Art Collective, Healing Justice Ldn and Colours LGBTIQIA+ youth arts as well as institutions incl. Migration museum, Barbican and Autograph. They founded TO THE RITUAL KNOWLEDGE OF REMEMBERING – that took shape as an immersive 3 day coastal retreat supported by LADA, and online public-programme as part of 12o collective’s curator residency (2020-2021).

You can connect with Lateisha here @lateisha_davine or pop down to Hackney City Farm where they are training as a Beekeeper 🐝