How it began…

When I was twelve three things happened that shook my world. We left the ochre sandstone bush of Sydney to migrate to the county of dark slate grey moors in North Yorkshire - England. It was a disorienting move on soooo many levels. When we re-migrated back to Australia a year later it was with a deep sense of cultural, emotional and psychic dislocation which lasted through my teenage years and beyond. That same year I changed school four times. And, I had my first spiritual encounter with painting with my high school art teacher - Mrs Eve.

In that first lesson Mrs Eve instructed the class to randomly sketch a pattern using wax crayons. I scribbled a flame-like pattern using red, yellow and white. She was teaching us a technique called “sgraffito”. Then she asked us to put a wash of black paint over the top. The black paint obscured the coloured crayon marks, but as I watched, the waxy colours reappeared even more brightly through the pool of watery darkness. 

In that moment I had an experience of recognition. I felt, heard, and sensed the painting speaking to me. On some obscure intuitive level, I knew that the painting was alive, had a voice and “it” wanted to speak to me. 

Later I understood the painting was telling me an essential truth about my own inner nature: my soul would always be present, no matter what was overlaid on top. I had an embodied experience that ‘I’ could not be covered up no matter what was done to me or in later years what I did to myself. I was not able to say these words to anyone, but some part of me knew that I had been spoken to by a wiser, more ancient voice, a voice that was born and spoke through the materiality of the painting.  

That voice lead me into a long apprenticeship for Visual Medicine through art school, through training as a psychotherapist, through working in an addiction recovery programme, through working as a massage therapist in a hospice for people with HIV and AIDS. And to a business where I hand-printed over five thousand metres of silk for my for art-to-wear clothes. The fabric was hand painted multiple times with unique unrepeatable monoprints. Over the years of pre-dawn starts in order to juggle my time as an artist and mother with a young child, I came to see the cloth as devotional studio work. I experienced the dye and inks moving in exquisite flowing conversation with such intimate encounter that I could no longer be blind to the reality that the material world is vibrantly alive with energy that longs to speak to us.

Creativity is a multilingual, multiversal conversation. When we don't try to control creation by second-guessing how the outcome should look - it bubbles, flows and communicates as an actual creative intelligence. It becomes itself, finding its true shape within the painting in a co-created relationship bringing with it a profound message for us.

What I have come to understand through my twenty year practice of teaching and sharing Visual Medicine that it is a visual transformer of old patterns. These patterns can be emotional, spiritual, practical - but when you learn their language we can see visionary possibilities that emerge through the paint as the teacher’s voice.

Portals open to hidden worlds that live within us connecting us to vaster dimensions of possibility. There is nothing we have to change about ourselves to be quantumly creative - it is our birthright.

Everything we need is already within us.