The Soul Mask Of Us In Blue And Orange (In Memory Of The 18)

For what can you do
With some hundred years of pain
When you have been the suffering child
In the history of the family
Of them
Again again and again ?

What can you do ?

To remain yourself
And sane ?

You make art from the dream
You combine them
Into your flag of self
That you paint and you
Stitch with the power of scream

This is the way
To sew by soul
And the story of us together
Is made to the prayer of
A recognised whole ..

"Cor Veritatis" The Heart Of Truth Highcroft Mask

I probably finished this sculpture this 2003 . Set in the forehead is the tower of Highcroft Hospital . The great tower that can still be seen for miles around . I know my kin from 1896 onwards will have seen this tower as a constant . I know they will have suffered as I did in that place . As a Workhouse it had housed broken family life - as a mental hospital it did the same ..

Our story connects the two and sees real connection of pain and associtated emotional imprints of it in children and adults not being dealt with but covered up so it repeated itself in undiscussed patterns across family life and four gernerations ..

Oh yes ...its more than possible ...Its tragically real for us the tribe of 18 ..

So tribal marks of the "18" were put on the face and a jagged tear for anguish . The moon for our aloneness is set by the tower and the star is for what integrity we had left ..And life will certainly injure that possibility. The eyes show the broken up quality of us and the cut circles within arew important as symbols into a circularised "Vision" into inter-generational suffering . When you do a work like this you know you are touching the sacred and making it a place of received grace and grief ...

The sculpture is made from a Copper Beech branch from the grounds of the hospital . Two others were made from the same branch .. I heaved it up from the nearby demolished area of Ward Faith 3 where I had been as a teenager .. "Cor Veritatis" : "The Heart Of Truth" ...

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Highcroft Hospital 2002

Snows on the roof
On the ribs of history
And from the wood
Of your beams
I remade our memory.

It was a sad thing to watch the old Highcroft Mental Hospital go into disrepair and then finally become developed for mainly middle class housing ..

As I watched in these years of its change I knew the Hospital itself had never been the problem for some of us , the grounds had been truly asylum like , but the main problem was a lack of deep human understanding and empathic therapeutic treatment into the human story that had seen a lot of us end up in this place . Passing the ex-workhouse hulk frequently in these years from 2001 - 2005 I saw ghosts and memories everywhere .. Young people who had been in Ward Faith 3 with me in the 1970's - a number of them dead through suicide or early death ...Joanne , Alec , John and others .....Gone.

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The Sixth Highcroft Mask

I recall in 2003 cycling past the Highcroft hospital cricket ground on the way to Occupational therapy to do some sculpture and a tree had been cut down near to the cricket ground .

I went to see the O.T. Woodwork Instructor and asked if I could have some help in getting one or two of the branches back to the woodwork section

A couple of the other patients helped me to use a trolley to get some of the wood ..

I never found out what the wood was .. It was very wet and yet as it dried the resin bonded it into a very hard wood indeed ...It cut well though, like the Copper Beech I had also found in the grounds from a tree which had made 3 "masks" previously ...

I never gave this one eyes and perhaps it sleeps in a witness sleep for all of us who were in the Highcroft Hospital ..