Kirsty Claxton is a visual artist and Alison Kidd is an experimental psychologist. For the past 10 years, we have collaborated as ‘Larks & Ravens’ combining our different practices and perspectives through drawing, making, metaphor, language and cognition. This enables us to explore and reveal the strangeness of our world and create physical and symbolic contexts which stimulate conversations and fresh thinking about the socio-political and environmental issues of our day. 

We are currently creating cardboard ‘gods of our time’ to bring to attention the powerful concepts which shape or distort our country’s thinking, values, politics and everyday culture and stimulate conversations around them. Gods such as Death, Justice, Luck, Growth, Nuance and Convenience have featured in godshed suppers, a 3 day godshed workshop for artists, thinkers and creative practitioners, an exhibition at Wales’ Wellbeing Economy Cymru Event and an exhibition at Bath Arts Spring Festival. 

Overview – gods of our times – the current panoply

The gods in action in thinking and conversations

Monetising gods?

A chance encounter and conversation at the Realisation Festival 2026 resulted in a transatlantic transaction between the UK and the USA and dispatching our goddess of Nuance to Washington DC – for work to be done…and a price!

Our god making seeks to trigger conversations about values and our current world situation. We did not set out to make our gods a consumable (or even shippable) commodity. But the unexpected request to purchase one of our gods – Nuance as it happened -as a special envoy to America was both intriguing, possibly timely and has brought up many questions for us to think about:-

Does introducing money into our work with gods change their roles?

How do you put a value on Nuance?

What is valuable?

What is priceless?

How do you assess a god’s worth?

Can a sheet of 2D cardboard carry a spirit of Nuance to another culture?

Should we take commissions for creating a god on request?

Nuance overlooking the Potomac River in her new life (October 2026)

Early experimental god&pie suppers

Thinking and discovery through making (link not yet active)