Pencil & Ink Artist inspired by things with roots & fur!
Rat parentage with Mouse heart.
I identify as Artist.
In early years I dreamed of going to art college, but academia was a more well-worn groove for people like me and so I was funnelled in that direction.
I went on to gain a first class MA Hons degree in German Language and Literature, with Social Anthropology as my minor at Edinburgh University. This was followed by nearly ten years working as a technical translator, a career that went against my internal grain. The majority of work was dull and repetitive, at worst morally grey. In no way did it chime with who I was, not that I had a clue at that time who I wanted to be or could be!
Eventually, my health dictated I leave behind those exhausting 18 hour working days with no holiday, no sick pay and no insurance.
It was through beginning to express myself and to be vulnerable through sharing my art in art therapy groups that I learned to feel safe enough and supported enough to claim what I didn’t know had been missing – my identity as an artist. I went from apologetically mumbling, “I do a bit of art…” my eyes darting around, unable to meet the other person’s in case I was challenged, to saying with a happy smile, “I am an artist”. I continue with one-to-one art therapy to this day – an anchoring rock in my week.
Art for me is: a healing space; a quiet, meditative place; a guffaw on paper; a pre-vocal expression of the inexpressible.
Art is an open door into the internal world I have created and explored from childhood, a world that has expanded as the external has shrunk due to Multiple Sclerosis.
I am an animist, perhaps a Cosmic Animist might describe me best! I believe that everything in Nature is en-souled with the capacity for union with God – where God is the Uncreated Creator, Atum, the Self-Engenderer.
Sadly, I believe that humankind, through its own actions, is the most disconnected and distanced from God now. And to the existential detriment of the planet, humanity treats everything (including other humans) as a means to an end, something to be used, without compassion or balance.
Of course, we could not survive psychologically if we were to recognise the value of life around us and what we do to it, either directly or covertly every day.
My personal way of living ensouled is to embrace nature with as much kindness and compassion as my heart and body can bear – trees, rocks, fungi, things with fur, skin and scales.
Nature is my church and creation my family. Perhaps the way I interact with the world will inspire and comfort others who also often feel disconnected, anxious and dis-eased in the Anthropocene.
I do not sell anything on this site. So please feel free to dwell here a while without any pressure to be “converted into a sale”!
Be welcome. Have your ears snuffled virtually by the meeces. And may you find something that speaks to you as one Fractured Being to another, sharing this spinning burrow we call Earth.
