About
Our People
Co-Founder and Director
Mary Attwood MA
Mary is co-founder and director of The Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred, an art historian, author, mentor and business creative. She is co-founder and director of Channel McGilchrist, was the founding Chairman of the Victoria branch of 90,000 member strong The Arts Society, is a qualified practitioner of yoga, meditation and mindfulness, has published two books with Watkins, and published an ancestral family book with the CFHT in 2023. She holds a BA hons degree in the History of Art from UCL and Birkbeck, where she focused on late medieval and renaissance Art and Architeture. She holds an MA with distinction in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred from CCCU where she researched renaissance art and art’s effects in general on the viewer/ beholder. Taking as broad an epistemological approach as possible, she studied the meaning/s of art, specifically quattrocento Florentine Renaissance art, in the contexts of ancient Greek philosophy, the neuroscientific approach of McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory, archetypal psychology and Renaissance artistic approaches.
“Mary does not ‘teach’ as such; she introduces a painting (or an artist, or an idea) and then enters a process of mutual discovery as a co-explorer…”
Mary’s teaching and research seek to offer a renaissance of art and consciousness, through a broader understanding of art, not as an object to be analysed, but as a bridge between seemingly disparate ways of understanding the world and our place in it. While honouring the historical, broadening perceptions of art beyond rationalising analysis, categories and styles, opens doorways both in us and in the image. But beyond this, she believes that how we look at art can reveal ways of knowing and seeing that change not only what we see in art, but change us and the world, and can help meet the complexities of modern living by offering a renaissance of humane values.
Mary regularly hosts our online seminars, talks and courses with our other director, Dr Louise Livingstone. She also teaches group sessions, including her monthly Art of Seeing sessions, holds private and group gallery tours, and one-to-one sessions. She has written for the Poetic Mind, The Journal of Creativity and Inspiration, private artists, and is currently working on a book which explores different approaches to, and encounters with art, and its transformative potency.