As our final degree show draws nearer and the pressure should be increasing, I find myself really ‘letting go’. My ideas for a large zen-inspired garden installation have been curtailed due to a lack of a large enough space, but fortunately my ideas have always been flexible, with a number of options always sitting in the sidelines. A conversation with our fantastic technician Danielle, opened up a whole new vista for me and it was a little like having an art-based counselling session….. During the conversation, in a flash of recognition, I realised how all of my current pieces told an auto-biographical story of a life changing event in my life. I had not been able to put some pieces together as they appeared unrelated, but after the conversation with Danielle, they all fell into place.
It was probably around 1979 / 1980 and I was employed digging holes in the road for Thames Water in London. I had begun the process of cutting out intoxicants and had started meditating. The process of digging holes (often on my own) seemed like a meditation in itself. I began to watch the wandering mind and would keep bringing it back to the task in hand of ‘digging’ (only to watch it go off again!) Perhaps due to the acts of digging, meditation and focus, I began to enter into very concentrated, contented mental states; unusual perhaps for a young London Trenchman…. I was digging into the earth with the smell of freshly dug soil in my nostrils and I had an excuse to be still in the streets and roads that were busy with pedestrian and motorised traffic. As I continued with my digging-meditation I found myself reflecting on the nature of consciousness; How was it possible that as earth-based and earth-made beings, we had this luminous experience of ‘consciousness / awareness?’. This experience took me down some very strange avenues, but it was a life changing period for me.
My conversation with Danielle (the technician) made me realise that my Degree was finishing with the telling of this story to myself…. big voluminous balls of earth….. earth-covered beings soaring with reflective heads (consciousness). It’s not a linear story with an understandable beginning and an ending, but an internal psychological story re-emerging, ….. a remembering. Perhaps with a flavour of ‘Nachtraglichkeit’ or ‘Afterwardness’ 
