I am, in fact, a spiritual guru?

I am not a spiritual person. Believe me, I have tried. As a child, my mother went through a religious phase, sparked by her Jewish Grandmother being denied the right to buy the burial plot beside her Protestant husband due to her faith, and having to undergo the indignity of doing bible study classes and being baptised in his church alongside all the babies and toddlers, at the age of ninety six, white gown christening gown included. My mother was horrified, and decided that she would have myself and my brother baptised into some form of Christian church, in case it might make it easier for us to find our eternal rest later. I did then go to Sunday school for a few years, but the inherent contradictions in the bible never sat well with me, and as both my parents were fundamentally atheist no matter how hard they tried, we gradually let that slide.

Not quite yet willing to give up completely on the supernatural, I saw a sculpture of Apollo in a text book and decided he was very much the one for me, which was probably more due to the skill of the sculptor and the good looks of his model, than true spiritual guidance. I was also deeply pragmatic about things - I figured that as he had not been worshiped for some two thousand years, he might be more grateful for a bit of devotion and hand out a bit of divine intervention, but nothing was obviously forthcoming.

People might wish to intervene at this point to say that spirituality is not transactional, and it’s not about what the divine can do for you, but what you can do for it, but then I was only a teenager and most of our relationships are fairly transactional. 

I flirted with Paganism in my early twenties, in a hideously embarrassing phase I have not intention of dwelling on here, apart from saying there were work reasons - and then I had to admit to myself that I didn’t really believe in any of it and that’s pretty much ok. 

I bring this up because, at the less than adequate Untitled Artists fair, Chelsea, the most common observation about my art and myself, was that I must be a spiritual person, a very spiritual person, and my work must be as a result of this spirituality. 

I don’t know if this is true, in that I know I am not a spiritual person and I am not trying to speak about spirituality in my work, but I guess I have to ask myself…am I?

No, I’m not this kind of spiritual - 

Because if you can pay a few dollars and get the secret formula to being a spiritual guru, that is the ultimate transaction folly and one I want no part of. This sort of thing is a big reason why I refuse to be considered as ‘spiritual’, as it seems that these days that is only an excuse to gather followers on IG by offering them some untested life coaching advice, which usually needs substantial cash donations to come to fruition, as well as a lot of pictures of sunsets with trite, self evidence bullshit written over it. 

I am, and will now forever be, a humanist, that is someone who recognised the power and uniqueness of human beings, and who believes we have one life to live and it behoves us to live it well, and try and ensure those around us live it well too. To this end, what my work does draw on a lot, is not spirituality, but the stories, myths and images humans have used to talk about what they don’t understand, what they fear, what they find both awesome and awful. It uses symbolism which is often linked to ideas of spirituality and religion, but I do not believe that these things prove that there is the supernatural, but rather that humanity is unique in the world in trying to speak about things that they cannot explain at the time they experience them. 

This imagery, these creatures and patterns and landscapes and symbols have be created, copied and reinterpreted by humans throughout history, the meaning and impact of them worked and reworked, lost and found not because of divine purpose, but because when we see a human story, we see the humanity in it and it draws us in, resonates with us. We seek to understand what it means for us, by trying to understand what it meant for them, and as even the memory of a stranger is a locked box we can never fully open, the memory an ideas of people thousands of years ago are even more obscure, and even more tantalizing because of that. 

What I hope I create, is work which triggers ideas and feeling for the viewer, ones which can feel like echoes, memories and sometimes their own thoughts and ideas, and so in that they find connection, they find something that works for them. I create work which allows the viewer to tell their own stories and, if they find those stories to be spiritual that’s fine by me, but they’re writing that for themselves. Some people seem to feel dreams are visions from the divine, where as I believe they are an exploration of each individual’s life and subconscious, and we see connections between each others dreams because they are fed by the same community, tradition and human connection we all share. Perhaps if we could remove this idea of the supernatural, the divine justification for our own rightness, and instead looked for and celebrated where our stories overlap, feed each other and are the same, we might be able to focus on making life better for everyone while they’re here, and not just in some make believe after life.