Category Archives: Installation art

Glass butterflies II

Glass Butterflies is a growing collection of photographs depicting butterflies in juxtaposition with glass: under frames, next to windows, inside glass houses…a metaphor that has deeply informed my painting, writing and thinking for a number of years. As well as taking me on a journey of deeply personal exploration, these synchronistic experiences have everything to do with releasing the Sacred Feminine from her “box” whilst learning to appreciate how that feminine aspect can be allowed to settle upon a much more equal and balanced relationship with the male-oriented, left-hemispherical “structures” of our three-dimensional reality. In a sense, the butterfly learns to work with “the box” on her terms and in ways that enhance her innate qualities; which is the very marriage of fluidity and form that underpins the art-process, taking “inspiration” through the journey of the creative act to where we have something tangible that we can interface with as a three-dimensional form of expression. As you can tell, the metaphor has many layers and continues to develop as one of the long-running themes of my experience. Continue reading

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Fire and water

It was just a little bit magical to find butterflies “fluttering” inside the vast spaces of the abbey I know so well, like a potent metaphor made manifest. Their colour and variety seemed to flutter new life into torpidity, as though the leaden religious narrative of so many quite massive stained glass windows had been exploded into shards then grown wings before hitting the ground; so, not the end of the world, just a fresh new beginning that had required the courage to break with old ways. Their unexpected presence there above my head seemed like a breath of fresh air sweeping through those unreachable spaces from one arched window to the other, stirring up the dust motes of heavy tradition. The reaching and arching endlessly higher and higher of all those immense gothic ceilings that speak of always striving, never quite getting there, seemed to be brought down to attainable height, their pristine stone made mortal yet in no way trivialised by fragments of coloured paper that could have been cut-out with scissors by a child. It felt like a sacred marriage to witness the two side-by side; both aspects made “better”, somehow more whole and perfect, by the collaboration of art installation and its most ideal space; in fact, I realised I had never seen the space look better than it did on this day… Continue reading

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Graceful journey: a Scandinavian experience

When grace happens to you, it is like a moment of poise that you just know is exactly where you were destined to be; one you will never forget and will continue to draw upon at times when life drags you back into its slip streams. Like portals between layers of space and time that tell us we are unfailingly on track, can’t even be off-track if we tried, these appointments with our own self-created destiny are powerful nodes of experience that communicate back and forth across time and space and make life feel unimaginably coherent, even in the midst of the most tragic or unexpected things happening around us. Nothing can truly shake us out of this sense of coherence once we plug into this personal journey of the heart. There is true power and strength to be found around so many unlikely street corners on such a journey through life; one which takes us far closer to the true epicentre of our own heart-maze than anything we could experience from following somebody else’s guidance on where we should be going, what we should be doing. Listen to the advice, yes…but the listen to your own inner guidance first; and take some of those detours down less trodden streets and be amazed at what shows up in some unexpected places. That’s when we realise that grace is, ultimately, an inside job and entirely portable, wherever we happen to be. From that space, we realise, place is just a matter of perspective; that the inner work is where it all happens and that, through the attitudes we adopt, we really are the true architects of our world, the creators of our own skyline view and (when we allow life to unfold for us) we are always, unfailingly, in the right place at the right time. Continue reading

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Towering poppies

Having just made the long-planned trip to see Paul Cummins ceramic poppy installation at the Tower of London, my challenge is now to adequately describe how overwhelming the experience was (and in ways I couldn’t have anticipated in my previous … Continue reading

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