In my bedroom hangs my painting The Fall Of Icarus, dated 1965. It’s probably the first thing I see in the morning, and the last thing I see at night. I was 17 when I painted it, and had just read W.H. Auden’s, Musee des Beaux Arts where he describes Brueghel’s Icarus within the general context of human suffering –

“In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

Auden’s poem had a profound effect on me. The Icarus myth is one of despair, but I responded to it with instinctual sympathy. For me, it incarnates the human mind caught between the perceived reality and the potential and soaring towards the cosmos where it truly belongs. For, after a time of despair, the impulses of mind soar above the human material condition and the narrow explanatory historicism that serves to assign each to his proper place. They seek to incorporate these into new strategies for survival and new expressions of hope. The poem was instrumental in enabling me to see beyond the particular to the universal, and to acknowledge what we refer to as the Human Condition. Icarus’s sun became the symbol for all we aspire towards. The urge to be more than we are, is at the root of much human aspiration. This striving is the essence, and can lead to fulfilment or negation, creation or destruction – there is nothing pre-ordained or inevitable about it.

Nairobi was a cosmopolitan city with Africans, Asians, Americans, Europeans, and, of course, the British colonial rulers, coexisting within a clearly defined pecking order. Segregation was the formula for coexistence, with separate schooling and housing and little scope for inter-racial social interaction. As a child, I accepted this as a given norm. However, even at this early age, notions of nationalism and cultural purity were being challenged as we had access to, and borrowed freely from, the prevailing British and American cultures, mainly through the cinema and music on the radio. Inevitably, this became incorporated into my identity and view of the world.

It was soon after that I started to paint. In retrospect, it was as if a door had opened, a portal had become available, that enabled me to embark on a journey where I could explore a better sense of myself and the world around me. Perhaps, the roots of my art lie here, in these early paintings as they brought to consciousness deeper forces which were not to find full expression till much later.

These upheavals in my childhood perhaps created the conscious elements and provided the motivation for my early sculptures. Mother & Child, Family Group, Lovers, are recurring themes. The mother, and the female element, icons of creation myths from the dawn of human history, express the magic authority of the female and symbolise all that fosters growth and fertility, that cherishes and sustains, and the place of magical transformation and re-birth. They echo the Indian Tantric mode of seeing all creativity intrinsically connected to the feminine qualities. For me, these forms, though imbued with power, also have romance, and emphasise how human beings feel as well as how they look. By the mid 1980’s, my Mother & Child sculptures were becoming increasingly abstract and stripped to the essentials of the relationship. They were focusing more on the universal principles of birth, growth, and regeneration.

It’s 1983, a searingly hot summers day and I was working on a sculpture out in the fells at Claugha Pike, a few miles outside Lancaster. On good sunny days I would often do this rather than be cooped up in my studio. Suddenly I heard little explosions all around me and saw little black seeds flying. I went up to the gorse bushes and could actually see the pods opening and the seeds being noisily ejected. In retrospect, this was a kind of eureka moment. It gave rise to the Pod series where the specificity of human relationships is transcended and, instead, the focus is on the continuum of birth, life, death, and regeneration, as in all things animate and inanimate. Even mountains are born and die and then give rise to something new. The pod is an icon of power, its most potent dimension is the inward space, the repository for so many mysteries. The seed does not contain the folded tree, it bears the genetic command. At the same time, the pod is a vessel, a womb, a container, caught in a moment of transition. It has movement, as if on a journey, through time – back to the beginning. In this sense, the pod sculptures can be seen as instruments of contemplation and meditation – mirrors capable of reflecting our potential rather than our actual selves.

The notion of inside and outside space is central to much of my work. The sculpture, Enigma, explores this notion of inside and outside, of what is covered and what is laid bare, of excavating beyond the surface of things, of trying to connect with the essence. Enigma appears to open her cloak in an emotional gesture, baring her chest. The split continues through to the face. Is it splitting itself in horror and pain, or is the split a defiant gesture, an invitation to acknowledge another reality, another space which co-exists with the outer reality. In Enigma the focus is turned inwards, the figure opening itself to reveal its interior – a metaphor for both the inner self and the creative journey of the artist engaged in the intense and often painful act of self- examination and expression. The splitting also invokes the notion of the growing force of life, splitting seed coats revealing their inner mysteries.

The early paintings, in part, may have been an expression of an instinctive sub- conscious desire and need to express and release pent up emotions and energy, and to try and understand my world. With time, and increasing maturity, it was becoming clear that this was no passing fad, but that this strong desire for creative expression was a quintessential part of me. I was not coming to it through some formal academic study or pursuit, but through some unshakable craving deep within me. I did not set out to create ‘art’ or become an ‘artist’. It just happened that way. It displaced other activities to the point that it became the primary activity. There was no need for a decision as it seemed such a natural process, to the point that, even to this day, I am reluctant to refer to myself as an artist. The need for creative expression is a vital and intrinsic part of being human, as testified from the dawn of human history. It must not be confined, as arguably it has become today, in isolation in some ivory tower, divorced from real life and people, for ‘experts’ and purveyors of art to indulge in and disseminate to the masses for consumption as they see fit. This commodifying of an intrinsic human need, desire, and achievement, risks distancing us from something which is such an integral part of us.

I fell into creating sculpture almost by accident. I had become involved with a street theatre group after graduating from Lancaster University in 1969. Two years later, this led to the founding of New Planet City – a community arts workshop based in an old disused railway engine shed. There were loads of railway sleepers lying about. A suggestion was to use these sleepers and create an adventure playground. Let’s paint them, someone said. Let’s carve them, I thought – like totem poles. Hence began a journey – an amazing journey that I am still on. External politics eventually, and sadly, transformed New Planet City into a youth club, and I left. After initial disillusionment, this was to be the beginning of a period of intense activity and total commitment to my sculpture. I found a studio in the centre of Lancaster; the top floor of an old warehouse complete with its own pulley system so large pieces could be hauled up and down from the road below. There were no houses nearby, being in the centre of town, and often I would work through the night, sometimes sleeping in a hammock strung up between the oak girders. My cats, Blossom and Mouse often kept me company.

I began to develop a personal visual language that could express my response to nature and human life – an entirely natural and inevitable process, so it seemed at the time. As part of this process, my relationship with my material, particularly wood and stone, has always been central. I make particular use of salvaged timber which comes to me already marked by its history – oak beams from old vernacular buildings, complete with socket holes and iron bolts, baulks of greenheart from old lock gates, and fallen trees from the woods and forests. The Cry evolved in this way, with its deep socket (mortice joint) transfixed by a wooden peg from its previous life. It came to me from an old warehouse on the quayside by the river Lune in Lancaster, built with timbers from dismantled vessels, including slave ships. Lancaster was the fourth largest slave port in Britain. For me, the wood seemed to embody the suffering, the cry, of the nameless thousands who had been victims of the slave trade, and who may have sailed in the ship that this timber came from. It has never been a one -way process. I do not see my raw material as inanimate things for me to manipulate to my will. The form and history of the timber or stone is the starting point for my dialogue, but this extends beyond its physical properties into a more intuitive realm through which the inner spirit of the piece is, hopefully, realised. It is always a two-way conversation. This is especially so with, probably, my most challenging and rewarding material – bog oak. This is a hard black wood derived from ancient oak forests buried under the ground in acidic peaty soil. Carbon dating reveals them to be over 3000 years old. I was first introduced to bog oak by an old farmer in Natby, a small hamlet near Lancaster, who stored the wood, after it had been dug up in his field, in a corner of his farm. I can still recall my first sighting of this graveyard of semi- fossilised trees suggestive of a living organism awaiting it’s second metamorphosis. For me, contained within the wood is an ancestry waiting to be provoked into being – a new life for a new time.

The amalgam of different cultural influences and the diversity of physical locations and landscapes that I have encountered, along with my family history, have been important, and a great source of inspiration. However, it has also given rise to a condition of marginality which occupies a disparate hybrid space. This in-between state has not simply been negotiated through an assimilation or interaction between cultures, or a fusion. It is not characterised just by a reaction, but through acknowledging the need to move beyond; through exploring a new freedom which is independent of these cultures. It has meant identifying what of the acquired baggage I wish to carry forward and what to leave behind on this journey. It is important to preserve what is unique about difference, but this must be in conjunction with some sense of humanity and commonality. This positioning is very much concerned with processes rather than finding solutions or attaining final goals. Artistic freedom, and the resistance to pressure from whatever threatens to subvert this freedom, can lead to opening new corridors, new ways of seeing, and new channels of communication. My reading of the Icarus myth may be unorthodox, but it has stuck to me since my teens, and has been instrumental as a guiding force, a doorway towards what I have been seeking and striving for. This has largely been an unconscious factor but, looking back, it has provided the continuum, the marker, for the journey.