Untitled (Focus Point I) Print

What did Brancusi Know? That is the question that has driven my life for more than 20 years. On a rainy day in London I took shelter in a gallery filled with his work. It moved me to tears, tears of something I couldn’t name, they continued for weeks. I resigned from my job and set out to discover what he had done to me. I got sick and began making sculpture in my pyjamas. Between bouts of intense pain that by necessity took me outside myself and my body. I saw my soul and sculpted it. Forms emerged that remain with me. A friend saw my sculpture and mentioned David Nash. By synchronicity I became his assistant in North Wales. A print on his wall by John Cage lead me to work with the I Ching, synchronicity became a path. The prints I made predicted the fall of the twin towers. I got more sick and could no longer use my hands. I made films instead. The films were shown and sometimes people cried. I filmed inside a disused chapel. Layers and layers of repurpose smothered its original sacred intent. But somewhere in the holes in the floor, the exercise posters and penciled calculations on the wall and the abandoned bible of a thousand tissue thin pages something showed itself. I had no love for religion but something else was revealing itself, something that penetrated to our true nature and our knowing of who we really are. I worked with texts as a hundred questions without answers arose…’What do you want from me?’ Hundreds of drawings captured my focused attention into or around a ‘Focus Point’. A synchronicity led me to an MA in New Media at Liverpool John Moores. I didn’t really want to do it. I’d lost interest in art. I kind of fell off the end of it. It was like chewing gum that had lost it’s flavour. I’d been given a book as a gift. ‘Female Mystics’. One of them, Simone Weil had experienced moments similar to my own. At times of intense pain she too had encountered something she called ‘God’. These moments had become the focus of her life just as they had mine. She was the only thing on my radar. When I visited to discuss the possibility of joining the MA course I mentioned her name. No one I knew had ever heard of her. But the course director had. He had because his Grandfather had been her physician. He’d monitored her as she starved herself to death to get closer to her ‘God’. He signed her death certificate. He had her medical records at home.