What does togetherness mean to you?

Living away from from ‘home’ since I was a student, I look for (or create) spaces that help bring people together.

Painted as a group of 4, these prints embody the sense that shared emotions and experiences create a sense of belonging.

‘Collective Effervescence’ was a concept first used in 1912 by French sociologist Émile Durkheim. 

It described what happens to people when they come together and become emotionally and physically caught up in something larger than themselves. I first heard this term when psychologist Dacher Keltner was interviewed on a podcast in 2023.

He described how we begin to ‘feel together’, when we sing, dance, see a concert, watch sports, attend a religious or spirital ritual …our bodies can synchronise. Our physiological state, neural activity our breathing ..can synchronise and align almost like a super organism - the power of collective effervescence.