Back to My Future

I am back in Ballyvaughan and have been mentally preparing myself for the questions I am going to have to answer in regard to what I plan to work on this year and how my work has changed and why.

I have returned with a sense of emancipation from my old worries and am getting really excited to get to work. I think my world is a happier place than it used to be. It will be challenging and exciting to go back to my work with a new perspective. I feel that I am looking into the unknown I have always craved and rather than fear I feel anticipation and excitement. Like I can feel that this new place is filled with light and joy, unlike in the past when I thought it contained things of which I needed to be wary.

I have been having this image in my head that my soul had been scabbed over. That I never healed properly from the things that caused me pain and I had become covered with scabs that both initially protected me but eventually acted as a barrier between myself and the rest of the world.

And that the work I have been doing -not just this year, but also the years leading up to now -has been a ripping off of those scabs. But the last big bits got ripped off too fast and too many at once and left me raw and exposed and in pain. Despite that initial trauma I feel this time instead of being a soul patched up with hard scabs I am now actually healing properly. I still have scars, but they are healing not just crusted over. I haven't felt that my soul was whole and accessible like it is now since I was a kid.


I am returning to me, but a different me. It's such a strange feeling. And I don’t know quite how to express it in person yet.

I have always been very independent -to the point of pushing people away and not accepting their input. And it has been lonely, although I never realized that until recently. I do miss the give/ take of interaction and working with people. Because of the way I have isolated myself I have needed a way to reach out and connect with the world. My art is the thing that is most me and carries me through the world and has proved to be my way of trying to communicate. But the one way interaction of just throwing things out into the public to be looked at was just not enough.

I think The Exchange is a way for me to become a part of the world and to create that sort of relationship that I have missed. And the great part is that I will be communicating from the place of me I love the most: my art. And will be getting art back in return from my co-participants as their portion of our relationships. I think this is the best possible project for me to start this year off fresh. I know that I will be working on many other projects this year, but haven’t a clue what they will be. My sense is that they will spring from the ideas and work that The Exchange inspires.