Jude Lally is a forager of stories. You’ll find her out wandering the hills around Loch Lomond, readings the signs which guide her to stories in the land. Stories that she then explores through art and ritual.
As a Cultural Activist, she draws upon the inspiration from old traditions to meet current needs, for our grief-phobic culture doesn’t offer the tools to grieve. She uses keening, a practice in which the Bean Chaointe (Keening Woman) guided a community through a grief ritual, as a cathartic ritual to express anger, fear, and grief for all that is unfolding within the great unraveling.
As a doll maker, she views this practice as one which stretches back to the first dolls which may have been fashioned from bones and stones and the ancient stone figurines such as the Woman of Willendorf. She uses dolls as a way of holding and exploring our own story, and relationship to the land as well as ancestral figures.
She gained her MSc Masters Degree in Human Ecology at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, Scotland) and lives on the West Coast of Scotland on the banks of the River Clyde, near Loch Lomond. She is currently writing her first book, Path of the Ancestral Mothers.
Website: www.pathoftheancestralmothers.com