THE LAND-BODY OF TWO TREE ISLAND: JANE WOOLLATT AND BEVERLEY CARRUTHERS

IN AN ORIGINAL RITUAL PERFORMED IN A WETLANDS NATURE PRESERVE, TWO ARTISTS MAKE POWERFUL, SYMBOLIC CONNECTIONS WITH THE EARTH

Published on June 29, 2025

From southeastern England, Cathy Ward, brutjournal’s London-based artist-correspondent, reports:

TWO TREE ISLAND, ESSEX, ENGLAND — It is said that there is history in the islands to which women escaped in past centuries to find safety and refuge. For example, the islands of Scotland, which some women saw as attractive places where they could hide and survive.

Two Tree Island is located in the Thames Estuary, about 40 miles to the east of London. Photo by Cathy Ward

Located in the Thames Estuary, about 40 miles east of London, Two Tree Island is a 630-acre nature reserve situated off Leigh-on-Sea. This salt marsh wilderness is a popular destination for bird watchers and hikers. In the 18th century, this area was reclaimed from the sea; a seawall was erected around the salt marsh, and the land was used for farming and as grazing room for livestock. Today, with its gently undulating, green surfaces dotted with shrubs and occasional trees, Two Tree Island is a haven for birds and wildlife.

Earlier this year, I traveled to this remote place, where I was guided by Jane Woollatt (Instagram: @woollattjaneart) and Beverley Carruthers (Instagram: @beverleycarruthers), two women who, for more than four decades, have enjoyed a close friendship and who regard themselves as Two Tree Island’s guardians. This outlook isn’t about land ownership, per se; instead, as artists, Jane and Beverley refer to and use the island in their performance-oriented works as a metaphor for the physicality of a woman’s menstrual cycle, alluding, for example, to when such a period comes to an end, and, figuratively and physically, a new lease on life begins.

The artists Beverley Carruthers (left) and Jane Woollatt (right) have known each other for more than 40 years. Together, they have developed a deeply personal ritual with strong, thematic ties to the female body and to the earth, which they regularly perform on Two Tree Island. Photo by Cathy Ward

Time, age, and the earth’s circadian rhythms play a combined part in this experience. The two women and the island together as a triad as their bodies and spirits harmonize with activity of the island’s tides and with the ebbs and flows of their own menstrual periods. This triad of elements evokes the number three, which has long been associated with powerful meanings among cults and in myths and folklore. With regard to Two Tree Island, I refer to Jane and Beverley as The Guardians.

For ten years now, they’ve been coming to this place to begin, pass through, and come to the ends of their own fertility cycles. Here, they enact rituals they’ve developed themselves representing the grief they feel as their bodies halt their production of eggs. During these events, they ritually bury the human eggs their bodies have produced; symbolically, they bury in the earth small, round sculptural forms in a gesture representing the transplanting of their own eggs into the body of their sister — the earth itself.

The small, plaster, egg-like forms the artists Jane Woollatt and Bevereley Carruthers bury in the earth on Two Tree Island during their ritualistic performances. These objects were displayed in the exhibition “In Plain Sight: Unseen,” which was presented from November 8 through November 17, 2024 at Both Gallery, London. Photo by Cathy Ward

Those small, white, egg-like objects are made of plaster and measure approximately three to four inches in diameter. As the two women flail and rage through the island’s muddy gullies, dragging along their heavy garments, their ritualistic performances give expression to their emotions of anger, pain, and grief.

[To view a brief video on Vimeo of Jane Woollatt and Beverley Carruthers’ site-specific performance on Two Tree Island, click here.]

Two Tree Island lies among beds of wild grasses. The Guardians’ ritualistic performances suggest that, just as the island’s surrounding tidal waters are ruled by the cycles of the Moon, so, too, are the ebbing and flowing of their own bodies’ red, menstrual-blood tides. I was present to witness Jane and Beverley’s ritual, not to take part in it but rather to observe and document it from a distance.

During their ritualistic performance, the artists Jane Woollatt and Bevereley Carruthers place their deep-red robes in the water of the wetlands surrounding Two Tree Island, symbolically pouring their own menstrual blood into the body of the earth in a kind of sacramental gesture. Photo by and courtesy of the artists

On the day of my visit, it was pouring rain, but as we entered the island, it eased and then it stopped. As the two women began walking along well-trodden paths, the wind picked up, blowing erratically but with strength. The Guardians’ handmade dresses, which resembled utilitarian, working-class clothes, alluded to women’s uniforms associated with nurturing, care-taking, and cleaning roles of a bygone age.

The practical aprons and dresses Jane and Beverley wore had been made from bed sheets soaked in buckets of water with rusted iron nails that had left brown stains on their cotton surfaces. For the two women, these stains symbolized sensations of pain. They could adjust the adaptable outfits they wore that day, depending on where we found ourselves on the island, in order to refer to different female roles, such as those of mother, carer, nurturer, nurse, or midwife.

Part of the costume each woman wears during the duo’s ritualistic performance is made from bed sheets soaked in buckets of water with rusted iron nails; that process leaves brown stains on their cotton-fabric surfaces. Photo by Cathy Ward

In developing The Guardians’ ritualistic performances, Jane Woollatt, who, since 1989, has worked in Britain’s National Health Service as a registered psychiatric nurse, draws upon her professional experiences. She told me, “Menopause is an event without a ceremony and one shrouded in taboo. I started to make a series of pieces that play with this theme. They were generated in response to my thinking about ovaries and endings.”

Beverley Carruthers’ grandmother was a fisher girl in the 1970s. She was one of the “herring girls,” migrant workers who traveled by land, following Scottish fishing boats as they sailed south in search of herring shoals.

The artists Jane Woollatt and Bevereley Carruthers have said that they feel a deep spiritual connection with Two Tree Island. Photo by Cathy Ward

In one of their joint statements, Woollatt and Carruthers have written, “We imagine ourselves as two women acting as guardians who live on Two Tree Island. We think of the island as a woman. Here, we make parallels between the island how she is mistreated, unloved, [and] forgotten, and the similar treatment of the menopausal woman.”

On the day of my visit, I noticed that, for Jane and Beverley, there was a natural, synchronized rhythm to their actions and walking pace. It was evident that they had perfected it over the decade during which they had walked the length and breadth of the island. They moved as one, their bodies harmoniously attuned to each other. The pace and gestures of their rituals felt natural and automatic. The two women know this land. They know the feel and very substance of it — and, similarly, they know each other well.

Jane Woollatt and Bevereley Carruthers during their walkabout on Two Tree Island, which is part of their ritualistic performance. Photo by Cathy Ward

About the garments Jane and Beverley wear when they perform their rituals on Two Tree Island: The hoods on their red capes are edged with fortified strips of fabric that resemble bloodied whips. These hoods refer to the mythic chthonic deities (gods or spirits of the underworld associated with death or fertility) of vengeance that were honored in ancient, Greco-Roman mythology. The Greeks knew them as the Eumenides; their Roman counterparts were the Furies.

The Furies were three sisters: Alecto (“Unceasing in Anger”), Tisiphone (“Avenger of Murder”), and Megaera (“Jealous”). They were often depicted with snakes in their hair like the monster figures — the Gorgons — of Greek mythology, the sisters Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale. The feared Furies pursued and punished men who had carried out heinous crimes, especially murder. In the underground realm in which the Furies were servants of Hades and Persephone, they oversaw the torture of such criminals, who had been consigned to the Dungeons of the Damned.

Left to right: Jane Woollatt; **brutjournal**’s London-based artist-correspondent, Cathy Ward; and Beverley Carruthers on Two Tree Island. Photo by Cathy Ward

In another joint statement, Woollatt and Carruthers have noted, “The Furies resonated with us both, because we are furious about injustice and holding people to account, especially if they break the law and do harm, particularly to women and children. We see it as part of the menopause transition and the benefits of when we become older. We are able to speak up, [and] because the potency of hormones has diminished, we are less under their powerful influence and thus able to speak up, speak our minds, [and] speak our truth.”

During my visit to Two Tree Island, as the hours passed, the weather changed constantly. Finally, the sun came out to join us, opposing the blackness of the rain-heavy clouds. The atmosphere became one of everything at once — it was both bright and dark, filled at the same time with energy and calm. In this setting, the natural elements and The Guardians appeared to be engaged in an ever-changing dialogue. Their robes were swept up by and filled with blasts of the crisp sea air, and when gazing at them from the shore, they looked to me like a ship’s billowing sails.

The two artists standing in a lush part of Two Tree Island as wind blowing in from the sea puffs up their long skirts like the sails of a ship. Photo by Cathy Ward

I felt as though we had been transported back in time, for around us, only two church spires were visible. Before me, I watched the mysterious-looking performance in which the two women grieved the life-changing, unacknowledged loss of their essence of womanhood; their fertility; the womb; and their unspoken bereavement and the need to recognize it.

Jane Woollatt and Bevereley Carruthers wearing the garments they have created for their ritualistic performance on Two Tree Island. Photo by and courtesy of the artists

Their strange ritual seemed to propel us back to an ancient time in which societies everywhere regarded many aspects of the natural world as being packed with mythological and cosmological importance. It felt to me as though there was some kind of shadow dimension to the visible, material world we occupy now, a place only Jane and Beverley could enter as they walked the island’s pathways.

Over the years, Jane Woollatt and Bevereley Carruthers have come to know every part of Two Tree Island. Photo by Cathy Ward

Would the event I had witnessed allow them to regenerate themselves from the experience of the earth energy with which they had interacted and which they had incorporated into their ritual?

Had the land-body union they celebrated become one with their collective, shared spirit, and vice versa through their symbolic offering of their life-force menstrual blood back to the elements — back to the lunar tides and the natural rhythms of Two Tree Island?