Darkness Reflected 

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see” Theodore Roethke

This body of work began with a series of medical eye scans and the visceral experience of distorted vision. In the summer of 2015 the vision of one of my eyes suddenly and alarmingly changed – anything linear became curved and bulged. Everything became distorted.

Science used advanced optics to ‘look’ deep into my eye and revealed a delicate and beautiful tracery of veins, the layered landscape of the retina, now a mountain rather than a valley. The diagnosis was - ‘an enigma’; ‘’a surprise event’. The beauty of the scans was entrancing.

The embodied experience became multi-layered, visceral and full of dread. Blood pressure skyrocketed, panic flooded all thoughts and fear warped all understanding.

These paintingsemerged from a dialogue held at the boundary between the scientific ‘truth’ (the scans, the structure of the eye, how we ‘see’) and the inner perceiving intelligence of my experience (another form of ‘truth’). They explores the transformation of experience through finding insight and beauty in the darkest of places.