the werehouse: explore the story
The dollhouse story of Red Riding Hood all grown up. Part fairytale, part spiritual alchemy (but all miniature), The Werehouse explores healing and transformation through traumatic experience, hormonal changes, and becoming a werewolf.
Have you ever dreamt that you discovered a new room in your house? Or that one of your rooms was filled with treasures? Maybe you’ve dreamt that your home was a completely unrecognizable maze and you were being chased by emus? (Or is that just me?) The house, or primary dwelling, as a metaphor for our inner world is a recurring universal theme that tells us something about ourselves. It’s a small leap from a dream house as a map of the psyche to a dollhouse as a metaphoric stage for transformation, and that’s where The Werehouse was born.
The Werehouse builds on the “Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf” fairytale in a framework of Jungian spiritual alchemy. Each of the eight rooms in the house represents a stage of transformation from the destructive calcination stage in the kitchen through the putrefaction stage in the entryway to the sublimation stage in the tower. The main character of the story is a werewolf, a woman once known as Little Red Riding Hood (now Big Red) who has been living with the presence of the Big Bad Wolf inside her since she survived being eaten by him as a child. The wolf inside her emerges cyclically, often ragefully as a monster, sometimes as a fierce protector.
This project is both about hormonal transformation that people may experience at different points in their lives, (such as menarche, puberty, pregnancy, menopause, or hormonal gender transition) and explores the psychological transformational processes that allow us to move through the long lasting and fracturing effects of childhood trauma into wholeness and integration. It also puts a spotlight on the often historically masculine figure of the wolf (or werewolf) in a feminine context of fury and protectiveness.
This project began in 2023 and continues to evolve as each room is built by hand. Follow along here and on social media to watch the transformation.
(Credit for the naming of “The Werehouse” is due to my dear friend Shae Foley, who cleverly combined “werewolf” and “dollhouse” into one apt portmanteau that perfectly describes this project.)
Miriam the Jewess from Alexandria, Egypt, known as a sage of early alchemy (and the inventor of the bain-marie double boiler)
a brief primer on alchemy
Alchemy began as an early form of chemistry, based on the concept of transformation of matter into pure, noble, essential materials. In early medieval western alchemy, this led to the creation of the Magnum Opus (“Great Work”), with the ultimate goal being the discovery of the philosopher’s stone. The philosopher’s stone was a mythic symbol of absolute perfection and divine illumination, capable of transforming common materials into highly valued precious metals as well as an elixir of immortality. Understood literally and materially, the process of alchemical transformation could improve health and wealth. But there is a much deeper significance to the pursuit of alchemy that lies in the spiritual understanding of transformation. Carl Jung wrote about alchemy in relation to psychology and the analytic process, believing it to be a metaphorical roadmap and a symbolic representation of the integration of the Self. The human soul is capable of undergoing great transformations through these alchemical stages, with the ultimate goal of reintegrating the psyche and the soul into a unified whole.
Bringing it back to The Werehouse…
But what if that human shares her soul with a monster, with a werewolf? This project follows our Red Riding Hood/Big Bad Wolf character (known as Big Red) through her transformation from violence and rage, fracture and fragmentation to a sublime wholeness using the rooms of her home to represent each stage.
Meet Big Red
at different stages in her life
(click on images below to read their stories)
Little Red Riding Hood by Jessie Willcox Smith, 1911, A Child's Book of Stories.
Image by Jovan Vasiljević
Image by Samantha Green
[A WORK IN PROGRESS]
There are several different interpretations of the stages of alchemical transformation. This schematic is an adaptation that best reflects the structure of The Werehouse and the story of Big Red. If you look at the rooms of the house, you will see that there is a progression of these steps from the ground level up to the tower, but the rooms do not correlate to a step-by-step progression. The kitchen (calcination), for example, represents the first step, but it feeds into the entryway (putrefaction) which illustrates the fifth step. This is intentional, as the process of transformation is not linear and often revisits and scaffolds upon earlier progress.
1. CALCINATION : the kitchen
The first stage begins the transformation with absolute destruction through burning until the material is reduced to ash. This represents a death of the prime material. We see a scene of destruction and burning in the kitchen. A rageful fit has left food burned, glasses and dishes broken, a cake smashed. We see a fire still burning in the stove. A pile of white ash sits near the fire. What was this before it burned?
2. DISSOLUTION : the bathroom
This stage takes the ashes from the calcination stage and dissolves them in water. In the bathroom, we see the skeletal remains of Big Red in werewolf form, relaxing in a deep tub filled with therapeutic salts to dissolve away what’s not needed.
3. SEPARATION : the hallway
Separation is the stage where dissolved matter is filtered. In the hallway we see light streaming in from the study above, contrasting with the darkness of the room. Dark and light exist in isolation from one another. In this stage, we feel all the feelings, including the ones in the shadows. We have clarity to see ourselves as we actually are without illusions and false beliefs. [On the table we see a figure of Demeter, the angry mother, searching desperately for her daughter Persephone trapped in the underworld.]
4. CONJUNCTION : the bedroom
Conjunction is the combining of the worthy elements that have been separated. In early alchemical texts, this stage is sometimes represented as two beings, one male and one female, coming together in sacred marriage to create a hermaphrodite form. (Often there is an aspect of death of the elements as they conjoin to bring forth a new, better element.) It is also represented as an acorn from an oak tree. The new life born of its parents is the culmination of this stage. Soul and spirit, masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious integrate to make wholeness. This joining might happen in a bed, but also in the context of Big Red’s growth, we see The Skinsuit and The Wolfskin akin to the corpses of these “opposite” elements that have combined to create this new form.
5. PUTREFACTION : the entryway
During putrefaction or fermentation, bacterial and fungal forms further break down what has been separated. The inauthentic parts of the Self must die, putrefy, and then ferment into a stronger, purer form. This stage is essentially what a caterpillar undergoes in the cocoon, becoming goo that recombines to become a butterfly, which must then go through the arduous and painful process of breaking out of its enclosure. Under the stairs of the entryway, a large dog kennel shows evidence of having contained Big Red while in her rageful state. The fierce wolf fireplace fills the room with fury. Vats of fermenting substances, fungal growth along the walls, and the remains of a moldy sandwich show what is happening in this room. As we ascend the staircase, we see butterflies and moths that have exited their chrysalises are rising towards the study.
6. DISTILLATION : the study
includes boiling a solution, separating impurities further and condensing the essential elements of the substance.
7. COAGULATION : the chapel
is the process of the substance forming a solid state
8. SUBLIMATION: the tower
begins the process of transformation again at a higher octave. The substance passes from a solid state into a gas state. The entire cycle of transformation is an eternal spiral towards perfection.
The Stages of Alchemical Transformation as Rooms in The Werehouse
Explore The Werehouse
[ image of house labeled with links to explore each room coming soon]
