Second Sight - Print

Wherever you travel in the world, you will find in the folklore and stories of a place some understanding of an Otherworld — a land just adjacent to this one which is home to the uncanny, or else is the place we go after death. The way there at the end of your life might be across a river, or via the axis of a mythological world tree, but there are occasions when we can reach this place during our lifetimes, either by accident or design. In many myths and folk tales there are stories of humans crossing over into this Otherworld and coming back forever changed (if they come back at all), or else of visitors coming through from this other place: strangers, spirits, fairies. Sometimes certain people are said to have been granted the ability to see or communicate across this threshold between worlds - a role that can be both blessing and curse. In Celtic folk belief one who carries this ability is said to have Second Sight, but every culture, in every place and time has had a name and a role for these world-straddling people, that is until the modern capitalist life-devouring project colonised our belief system and told us that such realm-traversing was either nonsense or pathology.

In my work I have been exploring for many years how the world of the Imagination and the vocation of an artist embody this Second Sight, so that the seeing into Otherworlds is once again valued instead of ridiculed, and understood as something we all have access to.

This painting - Second Sight - was begun during my solo exhibition of the same name in September 2024. The original was painted in oils on an old wooden plate.