I'm very interested in the idea of belief. So much of my work with interoception relies on belief. Votives can only work if someone believes in them, and so do charm bracelets. When people begin to talk to animals and plants, they implicitly believe that some sort of communication is being made and belief lies at the core of an ability to think like an animist.
So where do we encounter these beliefs in an everyday situation? How many of us rub a particular object 'for luck', or have special plates or knives and forks that we always choose just because they feel right? We wear odd socks to interviews because we believe that this brings us some sort of hidden advantage, or at least did do once. Objects remind us of special occasions or stories. They operate as doorways into the past, or even as some type of ancestor worship.
'Shrine' object made for a collaborative project
If homes were temples, they might evolve various alters, special holy of holy sites or shrines. As homes evolve, family members will organise spaces to reflect some sort of belief systems; children in particular will build 'shrines' with actants within them consisting of various soft toys or creatures that they have built up a deep, almost spiritual relationship with, but the adults will also organise spaces where they put family mementoes or examples of past sporting triumphs or memories of holidays taken.
When we were all confined to our homes because of the covid emergency and associated lockdown, there were articles written to help us come to terms with the home as a sanctuary. (E.g. https://www.hildacarroll.com/treating-your-home-as-a-temple/) It was suggested that people 'think of their homes more along the lines of temples'; they were asked to think about setting a home up as "your (and your family’s) personal sanctuary for your mind, body and spirit." I found this approach fascinating, people were even told that they could, "smudge their space by burning incense or herbs." The opening of windows it was suggested allowed fresh air (energy or chi) to circulate through a home and that plants would bring vital living energy into a home's spaces. People were also asked to review the art and other knick-knacks around their home. In particular they were asked "do they symbolically support the journey you wish to take going forwards?" How important the home surroundings were was summed up by the need for being "uplifted by the space." In these popular articles it was intuitively understood that a house and its contents were psychically active and that these things affected the people that engaged with them deeply.
I am also aware that many people of different faiths have home shrines and that these might be built alongside structures arising from more quotidian activities such as the clustering and building of collections of ceramic animals. Some of these activities can seem very like 'animist' belief systems, but they can happily exist alongside more formal religious systems. My initial attention has been focused on those people like myself, that profess no formal religion, but who still seek to achieve some sort of spiritual or psychic relationship with the world we inhabit. In both cases, formal religious activity or an identifiable spiritual need, a material focus can be used to help us meditate or contemplate on things beyond the everyday.
A vessel for contemplation: Terracotta bowl, filled with water up to the level of inbuilt boat
The vessel above was made to help with my personal contemplation of world events; in this case I made a terracotta bowl, with an attached boat centrepiece. When I poured water into the bowl from a jug, sometimes I could judge the level correctly and water would sit at exactly the level of the side of the boat, but if I judged the amount wrongly, then it would in effect 'sink' the boat. I had to pour the water very carefully if I was not to 'soak' the tiny terracotta figures that crowded together in the centre of the boat shape. This handmade vessel in effect operated as the focal point of a personal 'shrine'.
I recently delivered a talk to the 5th 'Drawing Conversations' conference about 'Home' as a belief, whereby several strands associated with this aspect of thinking were drawn together.
In the presentation, two sets of images were compared, both of which emerged from conversations. One set of drawings had been made almost 10 years ago after talking with a refugee living in a repurposed high-rise block of flats and another set of images were recent ones made in response to conversations made in relation to how someone felt about a ‘special’ object they had set out in an important place within their domestic environment. I have been talking to people about their collections of special objects, or the placing of significant things within their homes, to get an idea of how intuitions sometimes need to use material objects as ways to focus or make real, unidentified feelings. These objects were chosen because they meant something spiritually important to the people that lived with them. In both cases drawing was used to reveal narratives that had emerged from human/object relationships and as these narratives unfolded, two different world views were articulated, and revealed as being as much to do with fiction as reality. If felt at times as if the people spoken to had travelled in opposite directions as imaginary travellers, but both had also in different ways had to face a harsh reality. A third ‘life story’, this one happening in real time, was then interjected, both as an example of how the threads of stories about ‘home’ could be drawn together and of how life events are inseparable from political realities.
The first story opened out an idea that visualised a tower block as a fictional home. A story told to myself as the image of an actual tower block was drawn in a small sketchbook. This story became the starting point for a series of drawings that attempted to visualise a refugee's dawning awareness of how unwanted immigrants are. The images were also an attempt to show how utopian ideas, such as the Modernist architecture of the tower block, could become inverted, and things that once symbolised hope, now seemed to symbolise despair.
Home
The Mythic Tower
Cut adrift and pushed out
Tipped back into the sea
The invisible ceiling
The sea
Arrival
The Last of England
As migrants arrive after surviving the harsh realities of various sea crossings, they are mentally tipped back into the seas they crossed by the very people that they thought would welcome them.
In the intervening years I have returned to this and similar stories several times. Hopefully with more care.
Tales of protection and prayer and the loss of lives.
More recently,
a story is told of a long gone trip to Thailand, of a wooden baby that came back from that trip and how the baby lives on in the imagination of a post stroke victim, who remembers better days and a magical time spent in the jungle.
Tales of a wooden baby and flying fish
A tale of a man who found a wooden baby and flying fish
During the night the jungle changes the baby
The baby in the jungle became a metaphor for something emerging from the subconscious
The baby grown old
I was told a story whilst I made drawings, by a man who when young had experienced the 'hippy trail' in South East Asia, a story focused on memories that were triggered by a wooden carving of a baby Buddha that sat on a coffee table in the middle of his living room. I was also during this time, on evenings, reading another story, one that was focused on an exotic jungle, Chris Beckett's 'Beneath the World, a Sea'. In my mind the stories became fused, Beckett's vision seemed to me, to be of the unconscious mind becoming a landscape reality, as if the strange jungle described in the book, with its pools of other worldly waters, was a physically manifest unconscious, that was tapping into and revealing the subconscious desires of any character that entered it. Perhaps I thought, the remembered jungles of Thailand were like this too. The prints that then emerged from the drawings, became more and more hallucinatory; the passage of an ever growing old baby through imaginary jungles, becoming a journey into the subconscious.
But suddenly, because of events happening, there was other story to respond to, one that was far more urgent, that needed immediate actions to be taken, in order to resolve the issues arising.
A neighbour from the Gambia has been picked up by the police and sent to Yarl's Wood detention centre and has been told he will be deported to Rwanda. Our community is a small but tightly knit one in times of trouble and we begin the process of contacting local councillors and MPs, finding specialist immigration solicitors and trying to reassure our now locked away neighbour and tell him that help is on its way. He has already witnessed an attempted suicide. A situation made even worse, because he was then beaten up by the man he tried to save from hanging. Life in the detention centre, or so it seemed to the man our neighbour saved, was worse than death.
This is no home; this is a Hellhole
Eventually after a concerted effort of several people in the local community, our neighbour is released from Yarl's Wood on bail and he has returned to live in our street. He has horror stories to tell of a system that is in total disarray, one that is used by government to reassure the population that the administration is tough on immigration. Sound bites such as 'stop the boats', covering a reality that is about human misery and suffering on a scale that we have yet to get an idea of. I was happy to join in with my other neighbours, writing letters and badgering important people in order to effect his release, but a series of threats to his wellbeing still remain. In particular, there is a perception of gender in many African countries, that still operates in a similar way to how it was in England before homosexuality was legalised. The difference is that punishment in relation to any perceived deviation from the norm, is often far more draconian. These serious issues mean that any further attempts to return our neighbour to Africa, will need to be resisted forcibly.
Another group of drawings begins to emerge; I am still making images of what I'm told and these often become surreal depictions of life experiences, however I do realise making a drawing isn't going to release someone from custody, but what it might do is raise someone's awareness of a situation, or these drawings might begin another story, a story that makes people aware of the continuing struggle that many people face, in order to be just who they are.
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