Featured image: ‘Lunchtime Concerts’ 1979; Pencil and collage on paper (College project)
When I left college in 1981, I was offered a council flat on the eighth floor of a tower block in Wood Green, London, so I took it. I had to go through seven doors and a lift to get out, but I didn’t think about it then, I was living in a totally ungrounded, drug-filled fantasy world, and so being in the air suited me. I imagined it as my high-rise apartment in New York. The famous artist. This is who I believed I wanted to become. But I was extremely self-critical, not even knowing I was being so hard on myself. It had been a normal part of my childhood. This and my lack of confidence kept me in a cycle of wanting to block this harshness out.
After 3 years at college, I had had enough of Graphics and began doing freelance illustration. I did commissions for The Magic Circle, BBC, Channel 4, The Fiction Magazine, Spare Rib, World Wildlife Fund, Live Aid and various publishers. My work was small, black and white in ink or pencil, and it was detailed.
I also explored my own realistic and abstract artwork and crafts, sculpture, clothes design, generally with a nature or recycling theme. Artwork was my healing journey from a childhood bereft of emotional comfort.
My work got bigger and bigger in size as my confidence grew.
In 1982, when I was 23 I had a motorbike accident and broke my leg in three places. The woman I was living with, Yvette was on the back and thankfully only bruised her knee. It was a complex fracture and they couldn’t operate immediately as I had friction burns on my leg. I found myself in traction, (they put a pin through the ankle and dangle a weight from it to pull apart the bones so they can realign them. Sounds like torture and it was!). Obviously some nurses and doctors were considerate but my experience of doctors standing at the end of my bed with their white coats on and clipboards talking about my condition without including me, stuck with me. Also asking a nurse for a bedpan and being told it wasn’t time for the bedpan round and I must wait. These were just two examples of emotionally unsafe behaviours that stayed with me for a long time. It was frightening.
Yvette came to visit me every day and when I came out of hospital I vowed I would never see a doctor again as I had felt so out of control. It was another pivotal moment where I began unconsciously building my need for complete autonomy and to find a healing space. The accident completely woke me up. I wanted a more spiritual life and I started to explore complementary medicine, diet and fasting to improve my physical health.
I met Simo and Checca, the Italian twins at the women’s bathing pond at Hampstead Heath. Yvette moved out and they came to live with me. They had been brought up in rural Italy and moved to London when they were 11. They had gone to school at the famous Summerhill and were very open minded. They were outgoing sannyasins, disciples of Osho, an Indian Guru and I loved living with them. Through Osho, I learned about meditation, mysticism and spirituality. It was comforting and life affirming. Seeing life through the perspective of spirituality created a positive outlook. I also found a book called “You can heal your life” by Louise Hay and read it over and over. Its basic principle is “you are in control of your mind; it is not in control of you” and she provides exercises to let go of past painful conditioning and find that empowering place of being in control. She is also the queen of positive affirmations.
Simo, Checca and I visited Italy for months and I loved it there. They both also knew about wholefoods and introduced me to cooking brown rice.
In 1987, when I was 28, I was having a conversation with my friend Roger and someone I had just met. This person asked me what I did for a living. I avoided the question and mumbled something about crafts. Roger said ‘she’s an artist!’ That was the first time I began to give myself that title.
That same year, Checca and I went to live in Italy. This created the real foundation for my connection with nature. My first activity was to collect figs from a tree and eat them, I loved it and it made complete sense to me. We collected and cracked pine nuts on a stone and made pesto with fresh basil. We stayed with Checca’s dad for a while. He was an accomplished artist. He foraged, including mushrooms.
After almost a year with Checca’s dad and also staying at our friend Roberto’s house, we found a house to live in at the edge of a quiet village in the countryside. I meditated, (working on my inner demons of depression) and got a job working for Walt Disney drawing cartoons of Donald Duck for ‘Paperino Mese’. I would work at home during the week and go to Milan on Saturdays to the Walt Disney Studio to have my work assessed.
In 1990, when I was 31, I came back to the flat in London which had been kept on by Simo. Checca stayed in Italy, Simo moved out of the flat and I lived there on my own.
As I was healing, the eighth floor of a noisy tower block next to a main road with noisy neighbours all round me and no sound insulation, became a place of deep suffering. I could even hear my neighbour Tracey downstairs sweeping the floor. The sound of Tracey’s bass-heavy music in the night for two years and environmental health being unable to catch her brought me to a nervous breakdown, a catharsis, in 1998 and I was sent to a psychiatric hospital for a week. I then spent further spells in crisis centres and took anti-depressants until one day during a massage at the crisis centre, I broke down and exclaimed to the masseuse, “I’ve lost my soul”. I stopped the anti-depressants immediately.
The outer issue was always noise. The noise that humans create which, to me, made the sounds of nature harder and harder to hear. I longed for silence and the only sounds being the sounds of nature, I was obsessed with it. I felt breathless without it. I told a carer in the crisis centre that I longed to hear the sound of the birds and she said “well, we’ve got a birdsong tape!” I could have screamed; she didn’t get it. I wanted to be so immersed in nature that there was no separation. Birdsong on a tape was just another human invention and all part of my disconnected environmental crisis. I wanted the real thing, but I was on the dole, DHSS (Department of Health and Social Security) feeling ashamed and guilty. My friend Prabhu helped when he said, ‘Don’t feel guilty, it’s DHSS—Divine Help for Spiritual Seekers!`. I was living on £50 a week, no money in the bank and living, ‘existing’ in a noisy tower block in London. Sometimes I sat on my balcony at the flat with my hands over my ears, rocking from the insanity of the noise; traffic, household noises from uninsulated flats, police sirens, fire engines…and nature seemingly so far away out of my reach. My solace was to walk through Alexandra Palace park to Crouch End to buy my shopping from the health food store. Alexandra Palace was a walk across a little park next to my allotment and over the railway bridge. I also started to see counsellors and this gave me a feeling of strength and security. However, I couldn’t get out of the flat. No-one wanted to home swap to a tower block, I was trapped.
I was continuously burdened with the thoughts of how to raise enough money as an artist to get a mortgage and buy my own place. It was a crazy idea, I was an Artist! Money was an alien concept, and consistently making money without feeling utterly stressed was even more alien. I had been on and off the dole for years, coming off to do a few months of freelance work and then signing back on again. I couldn’t cope with the pressure of relentless work; it sucked the joy and the purpose out of making art. Thinking only of the conventional route clearly wasn’t for me, but what was the solution?
I spent the next few years going in and out of the crisis centre, figuring out in my mind, what I wanted. On one visit, I met a man who did photography. He showed me one of his pictures. It was a barge going through a tunnel and there was a small bright light at the end. It made me ask, “What is my light at the end of the tunnel?” and my first thought was “America”! So I made that a goal. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my trip to America was to be another foundation for my deep inner craving for a more natural life.
Centre of the Web 