Swimming Woman is a a variation on Burning Man that myself and a small group of friends in Seattle created. We engaged in Swimming Woman on the same dates as Burning Man. Instead of erecting and burning a male effigy we summoned Persephone back from Hades for the week before ritualistically drowning her so she could return to complete the cycle. Our Persephone was at the first Burning Man which was a small group of friends who met on a beach and burned an effigy of a man. She remembers that the original ideology of Burning Man was to inspire other groups of people where ever they lived to create their own version of artistic ritual. This is the spirit of Swimming Woman.

Seattle is surrounded by water, from lakes and rivers, to salt water inland seas and the ocean. So we decided on water instead of fire as a theme. During the course of the week there was an evening of improve dance on a houseboat with the summoning of Persephone, connection with nature with hikes into hot springs and the ocean where art was made from nature and the washed up array of garbage from around the world, photography, video, performance art, tarot reading, writing, and manifestation ceremonies, accumulating in the final drowning ceremony.

The photographs in this series are of the final ceremony where we release Persephone back to her other world.