A Picture Of The Soul Mask

At least three renderings of the same image were created to try to extract various senses of energy and experiences that inspired the creation of the masks themselves.

These images were not so much conceived as allowed to become themselves in a process that touches the deeper regions of feelings.


The process of feeling itself forms the colours and the marks by instinct. The creative technique lies in form of abeyance half abandoned partly watching. All of the wooden masks were made like this too.


They had to "become themselves" out of the unconscious reservoirs of feelings. In creating the masks I felt I was creating faces of the spirit of all of us who had been in the Highcroft Hospital or the Workhouse that it had once been before 1948 and the begining of the N.H.S.

The Picture Of Jackie Simela (Died 2002 Soweto)

It was poignant talking about loss sitting in the converted "Custard Factory" in Birmingham UK 2003 trying to find a way to collaborate in the mental health arts and just looking down at a small picture handed me of a South African man who had been a community worker and had been shot by car thieves in Soweto when he went to investigate a noise outside of his house .....

I was later to be so moved by him I did the picture and made him a spirit chief of sorts . Photo's of the picture went to his wife in South Africa too . That means everything to me ..

Life is often cheap and quickly over for some...Or life is shockingly painful and full of separation which comes in different forms. In fact loss , catastrophic loss , of family for me and even the sense of what happened was something that made me make the Highcroft Masks out of the wood of the mental hospital itself ...

I'd been in the Highcroft mental hospital in 1973 a broken teenager. Arriving there as a sudden admission . I'd lost my sense of being able to navigate what was real , what was "reality" .

Looking back I am not surprised I grew up having to split myself off from many feelings and even a language for my own sadness .. When I did the painting of Jackie in 2003 I'd probably made one sculpture in the Highcroft Mental Hospital Occupational Therapy Woodwork department. I never did art in paintings there though . The hospital never gave me that service . The first sculpture in O.T. for me was me taking control of my creativity. The creativity I need for my health . It was kind a try-out though from local timberyard wood. It was modelled on Akenaten , but deeper than that for me , it echoed "lost lands and lost times" . It was a figurative way of talking to myself . Of finding a way to live with permanent pools of grief and damage . The masks were to come next....