Talk: Bonnie Camplin, Dr David Luke and Michele Occelli

About

Bonnie Camplin in trialogue with Dr David Luke, Senior Lecturer of Psychology at the University of Greenwich and Hypnotherapist Michele Occelli, looking at altered states of consciousness and exceptional human experience, thinking about how perception and reality fold into and out of one another.

Bonnie Camplin (b. 1970, London), lives and works in London. Her solo exhibitions include Salty Water/What of Salty Water Portikius, Frankfurt (with Paulina Olowska, 2007) and Lightbox, Tate Britain, London (2008). Camplin was included in Strange Things Permit Themselves the Luxury of Occuring curated by Steve Claydon, Camden Arts Centre (2007). In 2015 she was nominated for the Turner Prize for her 2014 presentation at South London Gallery as part of Anxiety Arts Festival.

Dr David Luke is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Greenwich where he teaches an undergraduate course on the Psychology of Exceptional Human Experience. His research focuses on transpersonal experiences, anomalous phenomena and altered states of consciousness, especially via psychedelics, having published more than 100 academic papers in this area, including five books, most recently Neurotransmissions: Essays on Psychedelics (2015) and Talking with the Spirits: Ethnographies from Between the Worlds(2014). He has studied techniques of consciousness alteration from South America to India, from the perspective of scientists, shamans and Shivaites, but increasingly has more questions than answers.

Michele Occelli’s approach to hypnotherapy utilizes a combination of Ericksonian and ideo-dynamic techniques to enable processes of change and self-discovery. After years of academic research in both eastern and western philosophy (SOAS, King’s College and Goldsmiths College), he trained as a whirling dervish with the Mevlevi Order of Konya. The study and practice of Hypnotherapy came because of a desire to engage both mind and body as a unity, which is the basis for any form of understanding of both self and the world.