Dirt Bone and Memory

Working with the Material Dead

With Toni Coe-Brooker

A Dead Good Festival Event

Friday 30th October 2026
Time: 3:30pm - 5:00pm
Smith & Sun, 7 Thanet Road, Margate CT9 1UA

 £22

Bones. Grave earth. Human hair. Ashes. Mourning jewellery. Photographs of the dead. The things we leave behind rarely stop meaning something simply because we have died.

In this intimate, practical Death Witchcraft workshop, Toni invites you to encounter the material dead: the remains, possessions and fragments through which relationships with the dead are remembered, maintained and sometimes transformed.

Working with objects from Toni’s own collection and practice, we will explore the magick and folklore surrounding bones and grave dirt, the strange intimacy of hair and ashes, memento mori and mourning jewellery, photographs as objects of connection, and the personal belongings that pass from the hands of the dead into those of the living.

What makes an ordinary object become a relic? 

Can an object carry something of the person who once owned it? 

What does it mean to possess part of the dead? 

And where are the boundaries when we choose to work with what remains?

We will also venture into the ethics of material death work: taking from graveyards, collecting bones, handling remains, inherited objects, consent, reciprocity and our responsibilities towards both the dead and the places that hold them.

Create your own small reliquary, choosing and assembling materials with intention to form a vessel for memory, ancestral practice or your own relationship with death.

 You can read our ticket terms and conditions here. 

MEET YOUR GUIDE

TONI COE-BROOKER

Toni is a death witch, sound ceremonialist, ancestral tarot reader and co-host of the Embracing Magick podcast. Her practice explores our relationships with death, ancestry, spirit and the material traces left behind by those who came before us.

Her work encompasses graveyard magick, ancestral practice, spirit communication, death and mourning rituals, genealogy, bones, objects of memory, dreamwork and ecological death. 

Through workshops and ceremony, Toni approaches death work as a way of deepening our relationship with both the dead and the living, while exploring the ethics, boundaries and responsibilities of working at that threshold.

Come explore what the dead leave behind—and discover how the things that remain can become vessels for memory, magick, and connection.

@waxandkohl