Artist statement
Found Osho as a spiritual master in 1983, so a meditative life arose then.
Since that time have spent four years in several communes dedicated
to sharing his vision, in Europe and India.
Then more years traveling through West Europe, settling again in Scotland five
or six years ago.
We live next to a river, among trees
For me creativity arises out of meditation, and art is the expressive
play of form with that which is formless.
Thus the highest art form is in allowing oneself to melt into the formless,
to disappear as a someone.
In this view the 'form' of artist is the fool dancing on the
edge of the abyss, just a last game before disappearing,
another play at being something, anything, awhile longer. There is no meaning
to be sought in such a play, it is more
an invitation to share a dance, take a chance.
Hence what influences my art is nothing, the void, emptiness,
silence, death, and how to allow such presence amid
the myriad forms of life. We tend to choose those forms that cloak and disguise
such awareness. Meanwhile, the
door of Nature is always open, life and death one inseparable whole, and wood
has become for me a many levels
mirror of my dance.
- Samvado 1998
Still Life
Trees have shared in our lives for thousands of years. So familiar
we take them for granted, and enjoy their timber
for flooring to furniture and paper to fuel, not noticing the shrinking forests
and hedges.
The turned pieces in this exhibition are for the celebration
of trees in themselves. The designs are to show off
the wood, to evoke the tree, in fact to tell the story of that tree it came
from, season by season.
Hence most pieces are turned from a whole cross section, so the annual rings
can be seen, history read and the
dignity of its life acknowledged.
The ecological balance of man with trees has now been seen as
essential, but it is a long way from a plantation to
a forest, as far as from a consumer to the individual, and we have as yet little
realized how deeply important are
wilderness and virgin forest for our spiritual well-being.
These pieces are attempts to express the still lives of individual
trees from Dumfries & Galloway, some many hundreds
of years old. To be valued for their own sake, this is surely what debt we owe
to trees, not from a utilitarian market
view, based on our biblical right to dominion, but with the courage to look
in the green mirror, to converse with a
being stood in one place for centuries, and see what else there is beside wood
in trees, beside domination in us.
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