Camberwell College 1986
This is my degree show installation in its half-finished state. I hung lots more painted sheets from the ceiling to create a forest of colour, which the viewer entered and walked around, or you could sit down in a clearing and lose yourself in the forest. The piece was inspired by Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel 'The Mists of Avalon', a re-telling of the Arthurian myths from a female perspective; also by the architecture and stained glass of churches. There were a couple of happy accidents involving the 'stained glass' fabric I hung in front of the windows (below left). One was that when the breeze moved the fabric away from the glass and back, the colours drifted softly in and out of focus. The other bit of magic worked by the breeze was to provide a natural soundtrack for the piece; the long drapes brushing the floor sounded like the ebb and flow of the sea.
My final year thesis was called 'Moments of Time and Meaningful Coincidence' (for short). It explored the idea that the world was out of balance, that left-brain linear thinking had led us to suppress our creative, intuitive, and female qualities, and that we needed to balance the masculine and feminine. There was a lot of meaningful coincidence and intuition in that installation piece I think, and every new project I take up seems to lead me back to there. For example, when I first encountered the power of labyrinths ten years ago, I realized I had made one already, in my Camberwell forest. And when I travelled to San Francisco to do my Labyrinth Training, and the title of the first talk was ‘A Moment in Time', I felt another moment coming on. But, my left brain is telling me, that's for another page...
