Stories

I believe stories are one of the most primal, fundamental elements of our formation. I also believe we hear our first stories long before we are born. Our mother’s heartbeat, constant, reassuring, and other sounds and movements. We know we dream in the womb and what is a dream but the subconscious telling us stories - creating a stream of images and emotions with the materials gleaned from the filter of our senses.

Detail from ‘Awakening’

For a long time I’ve been reluctant to provide explanations of my artwork.

At exhibitions when people asked me for the meaning behind the artwork, I would turn the question around and ask them, ‘What do you see?’. Art and the interpretation of it is a very subjective thing and this was the reason I didn’t want to give my reading of the image: I didn’t want to impose my opinion upon them (as I saw it at the time) or influence the interaction between the viewer and the artwork in any way. I still believe that approach was valid; rather than my dishing out of a pre-set interpretation, I was allowing them to formulate their own, based upon what they saw and what that evoked in them: it was very interesting to hear people tell me what they saw in my artwork; sometimes it was something very different to what I saw. That was exciting.

However, more recently I’ve finally decided to share some of the stories and background to the artwork. This was due to a friend once again requesting an interpretation for some artwork and the gradual realisation that it is the stories that enrich an artwork.

As the poet Muriel Rukeyzer once wrote in her book, ‘The Speed of Darkness’:

‘The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.’

I think when we read the work or musings of someone like Einstein, we know that science, like mathematics, is so much more than just equations and definitions. It’s a shame because the way it is often presented at school (or at least was in my school) is in the dullest possible way. Which is why I, as someone who loved art, history and English because of the stories, found them incredibly dull. Yet physics and chemistry and biology are as much about the dance of atoms, the song of particles as those equations which seek to quantify what we observe.

Detail from ‘Kandake’

Art too can be seen as an attempt to quantify, to interpret, what we see – be that with our eyes or our spirit, but it is the stories that bring a work of art, a song, a dance, even an ancient, carved stone or hill-fort to life (which is perhaps why I have also found archaeology and geology so fascinating too) . Without the story it remains silent but with the story it is given a voice and that voice gives form and substance and expression to, and thus enriches, the creation.

Here then, in this website, are the stories that have revealed themselves to me. I hope that you enjoy the stories that I have included here and that they make your experience and appreciation of the art more complete. If that happens, then that will a good thing.