Every living organism stands in relation to another and inhabits an important role in in its own particular way. I am deeply interested in ‘relationship’ and how our qualities as unique individuals transform each other and the context in which we exist.

I am interested in finding ways to re-open our perspective on the quality of relationship and how just a few small shifts within ourselves can bring us ‘into the moment’ in order that we meet each other with a refreshed outlook.

Using natural form as a stimulus for discussion and with simple drawing responses, together we create an experience that opens awareness through imagination and through reconnecting with our senses in hope that we may glimpse the relational possibilities within all life.

I and Thou: Philosopher Martin Buber on the Art of Relationship and What Makes Us Real to One Another - Maria Popova

“Relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance,” - the Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize wrote in contemplating human nature and the interdependence of existence. Relationship is what makes a forest a forest and an ocean an ocean. To meet the world on its own terms and respect the reality of another as an expression of that world as fundamental and inalienable as your own reality is an art immensely rewarding yet immensely difficult, especially in an era when we have ceased to meet one another as whole persons and instead collide as fragments.

It is about observing and experience. What you are drawing is going back to you with a sense of time and evolution as you experience the form. There is an awareness of a much larger existence and presence. The more you draw and observe, the more you relate to the form honestly seeing what is there, not what you think is there or going to be there. This means moving beyond a name or a label to a direct kind of experiencing and learning. The work is dynamic – using all the senses – noticing weight, smell, sound, temperature .. and then we begin to see the world anew - Helen Garrett

The Nature of Relationship and the Empathic Imagination

‘The interior is infinite, all the way to the mystery of the inmost, the charged point - a kind of sum total of the infinite.’   

Paul Klee, retrospect 1926

‘Interaction is what creates and vitalizes the integrity of the living world’   

Nora Bateson

‘The making of a shell is something lived, not something calculated: nothing could be less like our organized action, preceded by an aim and operating as a cause… 

Nothing we know of our own actions enables us to imagine what it may be that so gracefully modulates these surfaces, element by element, row by row, without any tools other than those contained in the thing that is being fashioned…’

Paul Valéry, L’Homme et la coquille (Man and the Sea-Shell)

‘Something moves between me, and it. Place and mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered. I cannot tell what this movement is except by recounting it.’

 Nan Shepherd  ‘The Living Mountain’