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Between 1985 and 1995 I experienced the intensity of loss that any gay man living in a big city had to endure. I was diagnosed myself in 1992. I had an exhibition booked for 1996 which was to have been called Carnival & Lent. In the end it was all about HIV. I had to make something of the dreadful experiences: to try and reclaim something. Doing the work was very painful like transforming poison but at the end I could function again.
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The Seed-boxesMy first friend died in 1985 - the artist Mario Dubsky. The most difficult task in trying to show to people little affected by HIV what it is like to have your life turned upside down by it, is trying to convey multiple bereavement. Numbers do not help: they simply compound the problem by depersonalising individuals. Saying I had lost X number of people does not begin to describe the effect it has: the feelings of being the only survivor, an endangered species. Somehow I wanted to give my friends bright form so that the numbers would mean something. In the end I made boxes containing ceramic figures, like those made for Egyptian tombs, as totems for each person. Their names are painted on the outside with text which I hope evokes them. Each box also contains a ‘seed’ figure because I feel that if you remember it preserves life in some way. There are now twenty. |
The Dark Seed24 January 1994 - journal entry I had an idea for a painting to describe what it feels like to have this unwelcome occupant in my body. The image of a seed growing slowly, drawing on me like a parasite. But, perhaps, producing unexpected fruit... Plenty of scope for Freudian interpretation! |
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'Looking for the Silver Lining' |
Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality - taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be - by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that if we accepted things they overpowered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume an attitude towards them. So now I intend to play the game of life, being reflective to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow. Forever alternating, and, in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to the way I thought it ought to. - letter to Jung from a patient |
