Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood

Claudette Johnson: Afterbirth, 1990, pastel on paper, 118 x 83 cm

I was in Bristol recently and went to see the Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood exhibition at the Arnolfini. It finishes on the 26th of May, so there is little time to get to see it, but still worth I think a review as it raises several issues that are still very pertinent to contemporary art practice.

The exhibition sets out to balance our view of how motherhood has been portrayed in art, the introduction to the exhibition stating; 

'While the Madonna and Child is one of the great subjects of European art, we rarely see art about motherhood as a lived experience, in all its complexity. Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood will address this blind spot in art history, asserting the artist mother as an important – if rarely visible – cultural figure'. Featuring the work of more than sixty modern and contemporary artists, this exhibition will approach motherhood as a creative enterprise, albeit one at times tempered by ambivalence, exhaustion or grief. Acts of Creation will explore lived experience of motherhood, offering a complex account that engages with contemporary concerns about gender, caregiving and reproductive rights. The exhibition will address diverse experiences of motherhood across three themes: Creation, which looks at conception, pregnancy, birth and nursing; Maintenance which explores motherhood and caregiving in the day-to-day; and Loss, which touches on miscarriage and involuntary childlessness, as well as reproductive rights. The heart of the exhibition is a series of revelatory self-portraits – a celebration of the artist as mother. 

I went to the exhibition with my partner and one of our daughters, so it was interesting to get their opinions as well as my own drawing focused reflections. 

"Has it taken all these years?" was my partner's comment, as she had worked with several of the artists on exhibition back in the 1980s and was remembering how few galleries at the time, except for the ICA, would show this type of work. A necessary rebalancing I therefore thought, but her point was that it is now all too safe and easy to show work of this sort after the event. 

My focus, as usual with most exhibitions I travel to, was on the artists who use drawing. This blog is supposed to be about contemporary drawing and I have perhaps stretched the definition at times, but it still seems to make sense to have this particular focus, if for no other reason that my own art practice is drawing led. 

I have put an image by Claudette Johnson at the top of this post, mainly because she is able to transcend what could be an old and tired genre, 'the life model', and turn it back into what it should always be about, an honest confrontation with a naked, human being. The drawing 'Afterbirth' is a straightforward drawing, using pastel to communicate the softness, but also strength of a woman's body. She is proud of what she has achieved and looks us directly in the face and makes no apologies for presenting herself 'afterbirth'. I really liked this drawing, as it seemed to me to involve very little artifice, 'what you see is what you get' and what you get is a mature woman, who is happy to be in her own skin and who makes us aware that she takes her space comfortably. 

Paula Rego: From the Abortion series

This drawing is in stark contrast to the printed images from Paula Rego's Abortion series. Her women are also weighty and substantial, but they are also suffering. Theirs is an internalised pain, a mental trauma as much as a physical one. There is little pride here, society has been something that they have had to cope with and endure. 

Bobby Baker Timed Drawings 1983/4

Images of Bobby Baker's sketchbooks were on display. A wall mounted computer screen allowed you to make your way through her sketchbook in a very simple but effective way. As a sketchbook user myself, I must investigate how this was done.You could scroll through the images easily and for once technology didn't seem to get in the way. These 'Timed drawings' were done in those moments of quiet that occasionally pop up when you are having to devote most of your time to looking after small children. All you need is a sketchbook and a few drawing materials to begin to record the features of your everyday existence. The drawings are so different to any collections of photographs I've seen, because they have to focus down on what is most important, a photograph can select out a composition from the world, but cannot edit out and add in, in the various ways that a drawing can. The intimate nature of a sketchbook, really suited these private moments of reflection. 

Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas had been working with one of her children. These larger than life portraits are covered in 'additions', such as a child's handprints. They reminded me of the time when my children were young and how they used to add additions to my own work. The image of the making of paper face masks in the bath, was added to and embellished by both of them. 

Bath masks

My daughter made the small red drawings that sit in the curtains and my very young son simply, but effectively, added a few marks beneath the taps, so that there would now always be running water. I have several sketchbooks from the 1980s, where both my children become involved. I often used to include things in my drawings then that reflected my life as a young parent, I was still trying as always to work out what I should be making art about, and as the children were about, it just seemed natural to include them.

Toy monkey in the bath

The toy monkey in the bath is another drawing from that time, made using Crayola wax crayons, which were at that time seen as drawing materials for children. I was trying to see how intensely I could build surfaces and an emotional engagement with them.  These were A1 sized drawings, with often tiny inserts, such as the bananas drawn by my daughter. Not long after these drawings were made my mother was diagnosed as being terminally ill and my domestic life now included trips down to the West Midlands every weekend to visit her. She still smoked and watched the TV all day. I tried to use the same Crayola crayons to deal with my feelings about her and the situation. She collected ceramics, including the rustic head sat on top of the TV. It seemed to mourn her passing, a life that was being switched of just like the end of the programmes she used to watch. 

At the time I was very influenced by the rise of feminist art practices and the fact that day to day domestic events could become the focus around which an art practice could be built. Looking back, this work still seems to have relevance, and in a time of gender fluidity, a man making work that was about the home back in the 1980s, sort of makes more sense as an 'act of creation'. But back to the exhibition.

Mary Kelly: Post-Partum Document. 

The postpartum period in medical terms begins after childbirth and is typically considered to last for six weeks. There are three distinct phases of the postnatal period; the acute phase, lasting for six to twelve hours after birth; the subacute phase, lasting six weeks; and the delayed phase, lasting up to six months. Probably the most famous mother/child collaborative piece of work from the 1970s is Mary Kelly's, 'Post-Partum Document'. In Kelly's work she takes ownership of what a Post-Partum document is and in particular de-medicalises it and brings the documentation into the fold of art practice. Very radical at the time, (1973) it still feels fresh and for myself, I now read it as a type of Rosetta stone, whereby the dumb people of the art world are shown engraved tablets that translate for them the work that a mother has to do, if her child is to flourish. Like the Rosetta Stone, Kelly's engraved slate fragments were split into three parts. The top records her child's marks, the middle a personal reflection of Kelly's on how her child is doing and the bottom section a more technical documentation. 

The Rosetta Stone

It is hard to escape history. The most famous image of mothers and their children in the National Gallery in London, being Leonardo's 'The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist'. The two women appear to be very close, physically and mentally, forming a collective mass, out of which emerge the children. It suggests to me the solidarity women feel in their collective motherhood and like Claudette Johnson's portrait, these women have a gravitas and weight that gives them an authenticity. I feel that Leonardo witnessed this, or at least a significant element of the composition, and this is why it feels so 'in the now' and not a dead fragment from the archives.

Leonardo da Vinci

See also:

A tall order

Sexual politics

Wax crayons and oil pastels 

Documentation and drawing practices

Feldman's model of art criticism

Vanessa Baird

Children's drawings in an adult world

Collaboration and copying

A Braarudosphaera bigelowii cell, with a black arrow showing its nitrogen-fixing organelle

Tyler Coale, University of California, Santa Cruz

Two of the strands that this blog tries to weave in and out of its fabric are collaboration and copying. Sometimes as a way to develop new drawing ideas in responses to experiences in collaboration with another artist, and at other times as a reminder that we cant really exist without operating in collaboration with the environment that surrounds us. Our very existence depends on collaboration. Not only our day to day survival in relation to a symbiological relationship with the world around us, but in a deep sense, related to the way that life itself has evolved and how it reproduces. I was reminded of this when I read recently that a bacterium that used to exist on its own has evolved into a new cellular structure that provides nitrogen to algal cells. At a cellular level it is quite common for one species of bacteria to live inside the cells of another species. I have mentioned before that humans could be thought of as hosts for bacteria, as there can be more body mass attributed to them, as opposed to what you might call us. This is a situation that exists throughout the natural world, for instance, cells in the roots of peas host nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and cockroaches host endosymbiotic bacteria that provide them with essential nutrients. 

The evolutionary history of these collaborations can be explained using endosymbiotic theory or symbiogenesis, a theory that argues that bacteria began living in eukaryotic organisms after being engulfed by them, indeed the two major types of sub-cellular structures found in eukaryotic cells, (cells with a membrane-bound nucleus) are mitochondria and plastids, both of which evolved from bacterial endosymbionts. As all animals, plants, fungi, and many unicellular organisms are eukaryotes, this places symbiogenesis at the root of life's evolutionary history. 

At a cellular level gradually complexity is arrived at by cooperative collaboration

The fact that new mitochondria and plastids are formed only by splitting in two, supports the idea that it was in the coming together of different elements that basic life forms were created. This splitting is called fission and it is interesting to think how this is done and how the concept of copying lies firmly at the core of how life survives in the forms that it does.

Stage 1: The bacterium before binary fission has the DNA tightly coiled. Stage 2: The DNA of the bacterium begins to uncoil and has replicated. Stage 3: The DNA is pulled to the separate poles of the bacterium as it increases size to prepare for splitting. Stage 4: The growth of a new cell wall begins the separation of the bacterium. Stage 5: The new cell wall fully develops, resulting in the complete split of the bacterium. Stage 6: The new daughter cells have tightly coiled up their DNA.

A merger of an archaean and an aerobic bacterium created the eukaryotes; a second merger created chloroplasts which were the ancestors of green plants

The complexity now associated with these processes has evolved over millions of years and this evolution has determined that cells work in amazingly sophisticated ways within our bodies. Indeed there are what are called somatic-junctions, where cellular quality control is developed, as signals are passed between cells in order to develop bodily responses to the changes that it experiences as it passes through life.

A somatic junction that is sending operating signals to the muscles

These invisible processes are vital to our existence and in many ways they mirror the way that life can be led on a day to day basis. Cooperation is vital, a symbiotic understanding of the totality of life is essential if we are to survive. Therefore I am trying to develop more and more cooperative aspects to the way that I try to operate as an artist and human being. 

I value the input of other people much more now than I used to as a young man. But not just other people; 'others', is a term that can include all animal, vegetable or mineral existences. 

Landscape with interoceptually aware body beneath

As I continue to make images, the more that I can give form to the various stories that weave themselves in and out of bodies, landscapes, inner visions, outer limits and the psychic manifold that seems to envelop everything, the more I feel that there is some use in this business of making art and perhaps it's now time to return to printmaking, (I'm currently working on the image directly above as a silkscreen print). Print was my first discipline and composed the craft element of my DipAD and it was the technical area I was responsible for during the early years of my teaching career on the Foundation Course at the then Jacob Kramer College in Leeds. Printmaking and its processes are deeply embedded into metaphor, the notion of the copy in particular is central to the process, as well as concepts such as type and token, reproduction and impression. I was always fascinated by the myths surrounding the story of Alois Senefelder's discovery of lithography. The capturing of an image in stone and the use of grease to hold that image and then its release from the stone by a process that relied on a layer of water that sat on the unmarked, un-greasy surface, was as much a story of fossilisation as printmaking. There was something deeply meaningful about stones being able to both absorb images and then be used to reproduce them.

The dead horse arum lily is an amazing mimic. It copies the attributes of dead meat, so that carrion seeking blow flies are attracted to it. Not only does it produce an offensive odour of rotting flesh, it can raise its temperature, so that a fly will think it is landing on a recently dead animal. The odour it produces is a strong, putrid smell, very like a real carcass, this coupled with its flesh-coloured hairy flowerhead, make the plant irresistible to the flies.

Dead horse arum lily

This 'non-thinking' creature has developed a copy of the 'real-world' far more realistic than most of our human efforts at copying nature. The drawing above, pales in significance as an imitative idea in comparison to this lily's mimicking ability. As a communicative sign that works as a cross species example of bio-semiotics, it is wonderful, and it does, I think, ask questions as to how clever we are as a sign making species.

Of course we can manufacture artificial scents, sounds and tastes as well as make visual objects that act as copies of other things, and we have stories about how good great artists are as copyists, the artist Parrhasius was supposed to have painted a curtain that looked so real that his rival Zeuxis tried to pull it back. However who or what determines the need for copying in the first place. Is it a conscious decision made by humans, or is it a natural evolutionary process, as much organised by bacterial necessity as by conscious thought? 

A ceramic flower based on a dead horse arum lily

Mimesis is the academic term for copying, but it suggests a more reflective understanding, and it is not just about copying. It is a concept that suggests that we model our understanding of what is, on perceptions or experiences of what we think of as the real world, i. e. we need to make models of experience, in order to grasp the essence of what we are experiencing. These models are in effect 'copies'. When we try to communicate our understandings we have of experiences, we use the models as some form of shorthand and this, not only helps us communicate with others, the models also allow us to reflect back on the way we have in turn shaped communications. The concept of mimesis therefore operates in the gaps between the experience of reality, its communication through copying or modelling and reflection upon the process. In making a drawing or object that ‘looks like something else’, we are therefore operating at a deep level of meaning making.

References:

Latorre, A.; Durban, A.; Moya, A.; Pereto, J. (2011). The role of symbiosis in eukaryotic evolution In Gargaud, M.; López-Garcìa, P.; Martin, H. (eds.). Origins and Evolution of Life: An astrobiological perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 326–339

Schwartz, H., (1996) The culture of the copy: Striking likenesses, unreasonable facsimiles. Princeton University Press

See also:

Collaborative drawing

Drawing dialogue symposium talk

Drawing as entanglements of life

Hybridity and permeability 

Quantum entanglement

Printmaking

Mimesis

William Blake at the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge

Casper David Friedrich: Sea at sunrise

William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge is a wonderful exhibition, so good that I had to spend two days in Cambridge, so that I could go back and look twice. The quality and range of the images is extraordinary and it is not just Blake's work that you need to see. For instance there are images by Casper David Friedrich, that reminded me that it is possible to create landscapes that glow with mystic spirituality, such as 'Sea at sunrise', images that need to be seen in the flesh if you really want to get an idea of their intensity. The issue about 'Sea at sunrise' being that the image is stripped down to almost nothing, except the play of light as it vibrates through the air and dances on water. Light of course in Friedrich's case, being a metaphor for the constant presence of God, but for myself a reminder that the Sun is the shaper of all life on Earth, and that life originated in the sun energy charged chemical soup that we call the sea.

I was also fascinated by the diagrammatic work of Jakob Böhme. Some of the plates illustrating his ideas were printed onto layers, so that flaps could be lifted and you could see underneath. 

The Third Table

As soon as I began researching Böhme, I found a theosophical hermetic illustration of the fiery soul. The soul is, according to Böhme, in 'its natural condition' when burning. When the heart is represented upside down, it is immersed in the fire of anger. However, through the sacrament of baptism, the soul receives the fire of love and anger is transformed into love. I was very interested in this, as I'm working on how to visualise emotions, and it seems to me that they can migrate, and as they do, I begin to see affinities between them, anger being very close to love, the one often being triggered by feelings instigated by the other. His diagrams reminded me that we haven't really moved on that much further since then, an article from the Dark Energy Institute about how the Quantum of the Void compares to the Quantum of the Physical Universe, when diagrammed, would I suspect look very like one of Böhme's ideas. 

The fiery soul 

As well as being introduced to some things I hadn't come across before, perhaps it was the 'intensity' of people's visions that I was most impressed with in this exhibition, all of the works and artists represented, managed to communicate a total commitment to some sort of psychic command of visual language. Blake is of course the most well known of the artists in England and his influence on Samuel Palmer, who is also represented in this exhibition, was clear to see, but it is the chance to see a collection of Blake's images, exhibited in sequences that has the most powerful effect. I was soon wondering, because of the sequential nature of his art, how he would have responded to the comic book tradition, would he have been a sort of mystic Robert Crumb?

Robert Crumb: Genesis

Thoughts of this type still emerge from my brain, as it was shaped like so many children of the 1950s by having to go to Sunday School for most of our formative years. Therefore the Bible, whether or not we eventually decided to be atheists, would loom large in our creative imaginations. No matter how hard I try to intellectually move beyond notions such as 'good' and 'evil', an all seeing God and a Saviour who died for us all, my neurological wiring from those experiences, is still in place. 

William Blake: America

I had not seen all of Blake's work in the flesh and in particular had not seen a collection of prints from his 'America' plates before. After looking at them and thinking about how intense the images were and how much could be achieved within such a small surface area, I was fired up to get back to making some prints of my own, this time to perhaps use the new Risographic machine that has just been installed in the university. Good exhibitions always excite me to make more work of my own, they remind me of how wonderful art can be and of how it doesn't seem to go out of date. What Blake was trying to communicate, seemed to me to be as powerful as anything done today and it hit home, right to the heart; but not only Blake, other artists from the same era who had also been selected for this exhibition such as Philipp Otto Runge, all of whom were trying to find visual metaphors for a difficult time of revolution and changing social order. 

Philipp Otto Runge

Philipp Otto Runge

I thought Blake stood up very well in comparison to his European counterparts, in particular I thought his visual language was more expressive, especially in the way he pushed the human body into dramatic shapes and positions designed to heighten the body's expressive potential. The exhibition also includes some of Blake's classic images, as well as others I was not so familiar with, such as his satirical portrait of the Pope.

William Blake: Albion’s Angel Rose from Europe: A Prophecy

Blake: The Dance of Albion

The exhibition is open until the 19th of May 2024, so if at all interested do find time to get down and see it before it closes. 

See also:

Crosshatching as energy carrier

Diagrams from Dante

The Quantum of the Void compared to the Quantum of the Physical Universe

Fuseli and the modern woman 

Home is a belief

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 and Buddha

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. 

See also:

More on water

An exhibition of the Tower Block work

Diagramming Dante

Paradise Lost

The baby in the jungle