I wandered through unlikely worlds

Revisiting the soil, and then the seeds...

August, 2021

O mother I burned
in a flameless fire
O mother I suffered
a bloodless wound
mother I tossed
without a pleasure
loving my lord white as jasmine
I wandered through unlikely worlds.

Mahadeviyakka
A 12th century South Indian saint, who betrothed herself to Shiva at the age of 10.

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I’m telling a story, but for most of the people who’ve recently joined me here, you don’t know the beginning. It started 31 articles ago, and you’re not going to go back and read all of that now. But the more I get comments on recent parts of the tale, the more I want to reference back, because the early articles describe the ground onto which every seed fell.

The Lichen Wave c 1976

For living things, origins matter, as do histories of interaction between overlapping systems and fields. Together they create emergence, which, although untrackable in a linear sense, is dependent upon variations in initial conditions, uniquely patterned connections to multiple other systems, and endless, super-fast feedback loops through time. Every image I’ve ever produced has been an emergence from the self-organising flux of my particular biological system, which continually attempts to keep itself healthy, and more or less in the shape of a human being. I can’t really say that it was my consciousness which caused most of my images to appear.

August, 2021

I’ve deliberately tried not to direct my creative process. What has appeared has come from places I can’t know or see, in response to what I could feel was always beyond me; the great ecology of air, water, horizon and earth which holds me as I run around, tripping over my mind, running my outdated systemic adaptations, scrabbling to understand my personhood and maintain my ego.

The themes are vast, for me. So vast that I could never really see them at the time, at any of the times. I just felt them. I don’t know why, for example, that the direction of my flourishing was away from my art school experiences, away from my own culture, away from the recent history of European art. But the imperative to move away was inescapable. Someone once told me that there are only two conditions for a biological cell; either nourishing, or toxic. Nothing inbetween. Perhaps my cells, or my subconscious dream worlds, intuited a looming threat to the still weak signal of my desire to respond to the world with colour and line, and acted to remove me from danger.

1970s St Martin’s School of Art, pinnacle of abstraction and famous sculpture, was a weird kind of cultural froth, for me. I could find no way into it. I was fresh from my first year at a local art school where I had been taught the rudiments of drawing, the foundations of light and shade, space and form, and had been introduced to the idea of that pure colour should not be adulterated by either black or white. I had also experienced a tutor approaching my brilliantly coloured still life, still wet with magenta and fluorescent chrome green, and proceeding to paint big, bold strokes of ‘improvement’ (in Prussian blue) all over my fledgling response to the world.

That first year at the local art school gave me a crash course in the history of twentieth century art, which profoundly affected my 16 year old mind. When I saw that abstraction had finally arrived at Malevich’s White on White (1918), it seemed clear to me that European/American painting was finished. All the grand work of overthrowing Ingres, Delacroix, and the various academies had been done, and that was that. The blank canvas seemed to trump centuries of cultural and painting evolution, displacing even Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Chagall in my youthfully absorbent, plastic heart.

Malevich, ‘White on White’, 1918

What then? Pollock made me think, Rothko stirred me, Picasso was still wild. But at the end of that local first year course when they asked me to make ‘an abstract painting’ I felt like someone was asking me to jump of a cliff onto rocks that I already knew were below. I could see that the post-Malevich painters were having fun, but I had no idea where to start with that fun for myself. And I wasn’t sure that having fun was what I wanted. I had seen how Cezanne had remade the world into blocks and planes; how an apple, mysteriously, could become a portal, it seemed, to another layer of reality. Without understanding any of it, I set out on my quest.

The Egyptian god Anubis, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

I wrote in The Lichen Wave about being brought up on art books filled with colour plates of Egyptian gods and Minoan goddesses, countries where it was apparently simply fashion to cut a woman’s dress underneath her breasts. I had felt the gaze of a god with the face of a jackal, looked into eyes outlined in real gold, set with black stones; wondered at the fierceness of a bare-breasted woman holding a writhing snake in each hand. It wasn’t conscious, but my feeling was that there must be more to it than my fellow students at St Martin’s standing in front of large canvases frowning; that there was something more than playing with the sensuality of paint and colour, and trying to make people look at you. The lichen wave had called soon after I left St Martin’s and I couldn’t unhear the call.

Whatever it was, it was far bigger than me, and not something I could articulate or describe. It was the deep layers of the world that were calling me, not the idea of becoming an artist. My father was a cell-molecular biologist and growing up I had pored over the magical images he brought home from his laboratory. Pollen cells that looked sputniks; blood cells like little blobs of chewing gum tumbling down a sticky river; long thin honeycombs that I was told made up the exterior walls of a plant stem.

Scanning electron microscope image of pollen from various common plants, Britannica

In one attempt to plug the gaps in my education, I did a crash course in Higher biology, chemistry and physics. After a few weeks of study, I was in shock. I couldn’t believe the wonder of it all. I was also raging mad. Why had no one told me that physics, chemistry and biology were all the same thing? My memories were of separate classes, one for ripple tanks, one for cut-open rat’s bellies, dry lists of abstract principles and naming of parts, but look! It was all there in the flower! The beauty and colour of its exterior hid multiple processes, as fluids travelled up its stem and something mysterious made it turn towards the light. It opened in the morning and closed at night, as chemical messages moved within a cellular sea in responses that were still not fully understood, keeping its cellular structure in place and its endlessly-searching roots on the move. I was in awe.

I had no idea that twenty years later I would be using theories of complex adaptive systems to critique the stodgy Newtonian structures of adult learning research, using newer forms of scientific understanding to try to articulate the living dynamics of a group of people brought together in a classroom in order ‘to learn’.

An early painting from 2013

The images are about all of this. The struggle to keep going as I tried to make space for a process of image-creation to emerge which could somehow reflect these hidden energies; which might release the possibilities of a half-conscious dynamic flow between hand and consciousness, heart and eye. I wanted to explore the power of images to work on the human mind, mine and other people’s, and on feeling. I wanted to fathom the miracle of colour, and learn how to utilise my own version of the capacity of humans to push something out of themselves that is able to speak beyond their own limited consciousness and vision.

February, 2022

This is why I feel that the images are, in some real sense not about me, mine. Of course, they are mine, in the sense that I painted them. But it feels more like this is what has happened to me, over decades, as I’ve tried to open to vast biological, physical, cultural and historical forces; through exposure to cultures doing it another way, images made for a different purpose, philosophies working with different questions.

February, 2022

Mahadeviyakka quote from:

Ramanujan, A. K. (1973), Speaking of Siva, London: Penguin Books.