The Address

A dream, a symphony, a photograph, re-membering

Just after I graduated from Art School in 1978, an American student asked me if I’d like to take over her rented room as she was returning home, and I moved from a wretched bedsit, with various tenants living in small cramped rooms round a small cramped hall, each of us with audibly unhappy lives, to a massive room in an exquisitely beautiful building, designed by one of our city’s most famous architects, Alexander Greek Thomson. There was a huge stone fireplace that was reminiscent of a castle, a wooden panelled ceiling with gold leaf decorations and pale green stencils, ornate doors with intricate multicoloured enamelled and etched brass door plates. I lived there for a few years.

My room, 1983

I dreamt about that room earlier this year and explored the dream with my dream group. In it, a character referred to the building as a clinic, which sparked reflections on how my years there had been a time of healing. A member of the group was intrigued by the address – Great Western Terrace - and mentioned at our next meeting that she’d looked it up online and found photographs. I was curious, Googled it, and found a picture online of the room in 1983 when I was living there, with my paintings on the wall, my dresses hanging on screens, my palette and brushes. There were pictures of the room upstairs too, which a friend rented, and his walls were filled with my paintings. I vaguely remember a photographer from the Greek Thomson society coming in with a camera all those years ago.

Seeing the pictures had a powerful impact on me. I was reminded of the outpouring of creativity at a time that I had tended to look back on with shame, as my emotional life had been painful and volatile – I had judged my younger self as unstable.

my friend’s room

Seeing the photos of my room from 1983, I realised that I could respect the younger me, instead of trying to disown her while feeling the pull of shame. There’s another meaningful coincidence here – I would have been 25 or 26 in 1983: my daughter turned 26 this year and at the start of the year, she was going through her own dark night of the soul. Creativity was pouring out of her, as she created her first album of angry and heartbroken songs.

One of the comforts and joys at that time had been listening to Mahler. The friend who lived upstairs also loved Mahler and we would listen to the symphonies and talk at length about how they moved us, our favourite singer of Mahler’s songs – Dame Janet Baker - and our favourite conductors and orchestras for each of the symphonies.

Just after that dream group, I attended the introduction to the Rubedo part of the Magnum Opus course. I jolted to attention when the speaker played an excerpt of Bernstein conducting Mahler’s Second Symphony – the Resurrection. I had not listened to it for a long time, and to hear it in such close proximity to the dream was powerful, bringing back many more feelings from that time of my life.

As I looked at the photos of that room and heard the music that I had listened to so often, I attuned to the full intensity of the despair and the divine love in that music and the sense of connection I had to the divine as I painted back then. I understood that making art had been a means towards internal inquiry, therapy and connection to the numinous for me. The periods of intense inspiration had been a way of processing a lot of material from the unconscious. As my inner processing speeded up, painting was no longer satisfying the same purpose.

Another curious synchronicity occurred just after finding this photograph. I’ve been facilitating a creativity coaching group for about eight or nine years, meeting every four to six weeks. One member of the group left her cardigan behind, and I arranged to drop it in to her. She lives nearby, but I’d never been in her house. I accepted her invitation to come in for a coffee and admired some of the paintings on her walls. One was by an artist who had lived upstairs at that same address in Great Western Terrace, at the same time as I had been there, and I learned that she had passed away just two weeks earlier. I had not seen her for around thirty years.

I have been circumambulating my life since having a retrospective exhibition in 2018. Decluttering and the shift from painting to coaching intensified that process of reflection. Although there has been a distinct sense of telos pulling me forward to my new life, the change happened fast, leaving something in me rather dazed, and it’s taking time for the story of my identity as an artist to catch up with the rest of me. To support the catching up it’s been essential to remember, as in re-member, or join up again, the parts of me that I was trying to cut free from, and to honour all that I have lived and all the variations of me that I have lived. I can now almost taste that part of my life that I had half forgotten about, and that is helping me to digest what had felt indigestible when I was younger.

And as I acknowledge the flood of creativity of those more difficult times in my life, I am also discovering that creativity did not leave but is instead finding exhilarating new mediums, particularly in relationship: in coaching, facilitating, and friendships.