Island dreaming

In some ways, this was a holiday like no other. Not that anything in particular happened of course but that it confirmed how odd life had been for the past five months. It took quite some time to decompress from what has been a silently stressful time, like the perpetual feeling one has left the cooker on an hour into a long car journey. It has also been an uncomfortable mirror to who we are and what we do in this world. How we are to each other and how we take far too much. Although lock down should be a time of space and reflection, it felt to me like high alert, the culmination of sins and a turning point towards a future that we better be damn well prepared for. Not to mention some reckoning with our total purpose; the purpose of art and how we can actually make a difference. These are positive and necessary considerations but time is not on our side. It is cliched and wrong to talk of a battle for the future because one side of that battle sees no future. When cynicism breaks towards hate you erase hope and in that erasure, violence, despotism and ignorance gives us the death cult of Trump, the nonchalance of Johnson and the quickened pace of the fossil fuel industries for exploitation and greed.

These drawings reflect little of that internal struggle and questioning although it is remarkable how, in the act of drawing, such conversations ignite and find meaning. How revolutionary it is to look and feel.