This photograph speaks to passage and time. Connection with another time and place and the journeying towards a new one.

This Photograph brought me back to a time when I was very lost in my life. I was in a relationship I wasn’t sure about and most of my friends had moved away from England to America. I felt alone and I was looking for comradely, for people who felt the same way I did. But then, somehow, when people were around me I felt more lost and lonely. I felt a deep sense of isolation and from that, this song was born.

For me, this Song was about being lost and stuck. It was about making a decision that seems impossible to make and that you need to be rescued from just the idea of it. I was brought to the memory of a friend who was going through a divorce and watching her kids suffer as she was suffering and how powerless she felt. The body gesture in my painting represents having your feet planted in the sand and yet being at the mercy of the waves.

In this Song I heard the story of a man who needed saving from his deep sorrow. I saw him wanting to be saved by a woman who he had hurt badly. In my story, he had not paid enough attention to her. He had been egocentric and as a result, had lost her. It is only in her absence that he can see his mistake. He has upset her and lost her and in so doing has lost himself. In the video she is torn between the decision to save him or to save herself.

To me, this Painting is about mystical innocents and power. My story of this image is that a sea goddess is guiding and protecting a small boat through a rough and difficult journey across a stormy gray sea. My impression of this Sea Goddess is that she is peaceful, she’s in charge, calm and pure but strong. The boat is lost at sea, adrift and in big waves, and she’s guiding it to somewhere safe. I immediately wanted to make a ‘salty amber’ to represent the essence of this painting and this goddess. The saltiness of her waves, her naked body and hair were translated into light notes. The deep mysterious nature of what lay below the surface of the deep ocean is sensual and breathless and pulled me in and called for Amber.

The film had a dream quality that I interpreted as a fairytale or a modernization of a Greek Myth. I looked at the video a number of times – making sure I was really seeing it. I studied it frame by frame to really look at the background and the objects. I tried to capture the tone and hold on to the dream quality . My first idea was a message in a bottle using all the writing I had done, then I made shoes out of imaginary maps – but both those ideas were too complicated so I went back to the story and settled on the bowl on wheels – like a crazy dream that makes sense but is a little off. My title is the first line in my writing. it’s about finding ways to extract oneself from situations and really find release. I imagined that is how the character in the video would have spent his time – daydreaming he was somewhere else.

he strongest emotion arising from the video was the loneliness and sense of helplessness. I felt the concept of the video was an expression of two people feeling the same pain and loneliness but who are unable to reach out to each other. Perhaps they held the key to each other’s happiness but they led parallel lives. I watched the film a number of times and made a list of immediate responses, things like shadows, the color blue, out of reach, fish bowl, water, reflections, loneliness, raft, drifting off and helplessness. I started to think about ways I could connect the characters, obvious things like dropping a rope down to this drifting character, a ladder or steps of some sort. However the overriding concept of the film with her being real and him being animated suggested to me that they would never cross paths, they led parallel lives. I worked with some birch branches from a storm felled tree from my own garden. The wood has its own story and carries its own sadness. It was not ready to come down, a vibrant healthy tree unfortunately taken by the wind. The beautiful and evolving bark enabled me to color co-ordinate the steps from darkness to light, going from depths to greater heights. The feelings of sadness and separation are transient feelings that come and go, you need to the shade so you recognize how good the light feels when it comes, the light reminds you the darkness doesn’t last forever.

I connected immediately to the scent. It created an image of this breathtaking woman. She is walking into this white, warm, naturally lit room and everyone exhales at her presence. She’s this natural beauty. Confident but not aggressively so. I imagined her with wet hair and no make up. She says, “here I am. This is just me.” She is soft, crisp, sensual, and fresh. I created a dress in two pieces that drapes and wraps around the body.

This chain represented Uncertainty for me and yet it also elicited Hope. I felt that the art and pieces could be interpreted as very dark. There is lots of sea and fog and uncertainty. But one line in the song was “”I Leave This Storm Behind Me”” and I felt it was a way of seeing hope and the future even when things are unclear or dark. After opening the artwork I looked at images of all the pieces in the order in which they were all created while listening to the song. The textures on the walls came to me first and I started sketching shapes for the space and little floor plans too. I hope to have the lighting slowly change on the environment to speak to how I fee about the pieces of art and about change.