Don't Betray Your Heart

Be Brutal, Be Honest, Be Yourself.

This is my sixth year of being based at Hitchin Lavender. I have previously spoken about how the landscape is a critical aspect of my practice, which spans art and magic. Publicly, I have typically attempted to separate these facets of my work, as I find that the society we exist within has compartmentalised them to exist as separate actions when in truth, I see them as the same thing. It never feels good, to not speak from the totality of who and what I am. From my vantage point, I am a magician. And as complicated as it might be for society to deal with that fact, that's what I am. I'm not really comfortable with the term shaman (Although I've used it) nor am I really comfortable being called a multi-discipline artist or even worse a multi-hyphenate artist. Perhaps you could call me a storyteller, but even that doesn't really fit and feels reductive. As much as I respect the story as the key to our existence here on planet Earth. And that's why the punk movement and its violence towards the concept of labels were always going to be a landscape where I felt most comfortable. One of my great masters, Artaud ended up in an asylum, a misunderstood man of ideas that fell way beyond the edge of what was deemed acceptable by society. I have always found comfort in the raw trenches that truth resides within, the landscape that truth battles with inauthenticity. Yet truth is also a complicated term, whose truth? There is a sacred truth for every living thing that exists.

Why am I thinking about this now? Well, the grand project over the last year or two has been an attempt to unify all facets of my practice. To integrate and present an accurate representation of my life story and how it relates to what I perceive to be the actions I came here to accomplish.