My old habit is to work work work but times are changing and so am I. This is an important part of creating - to be still and listen to the ghosts of the future too. Even though the inspiration for my work is deeply entwined in the stories of the past, it’s the future where they will show their faces and live. There’s a reason why we have to trust intuition to guide art - usually artists are like surfers - riding the wave of what’s to come before it has crashed on the shore of the present.
For this reason, even though it can feel confusing & daunting. Perhaps not many people get what you’re doing or why but we have to trust those weird hunches when making art. Even when I don’t know the end of the road, the ghosts of the past and future do.
A great way to track messages from future ghosts is to keep journals and also to create collages. Each year I create a collage for the year to come and I call them living tarot cards. When I made the one above, it was in 2022 but for some reason I had a hard time connecting and understanding it. I knew I was making it about the next pilgrimage to Scotland and Ireland but I just kept feeling that something wasn’t right.
I make these collages very quickly and I was confused about the placement of large moth at the bottom of the image, I took the moth out and then put it back. It all seemed silent - it wasn’t talking to me.
I sat the living tarot card aside & forgot about it.
When I look at this future ghost now, 3 years after creating it and 18 months after making the physical pilgrimage in 2023, I’m stunned to see how many symbols and messages it was giving me all along. The pilgrimage in 2023 was definitely a shadow journey and in the middle of it I became extremely ill. On this journey I was shown that I cannot do my work if I don’t care for my body properly. I remember at one stage on the journey lugging my enormous bag of cameras, recording equipment and STUFF (so much stuff) and feeling as though I was lugging around a dead body.
And in a sense, I was lugging around my old self and fears about control - believing that I had to carry everything I thought I needed to do my work well. And attached to me at all times. Unfortunately I had contracted a lung infection on the flight and unchecked this travelled down into my kidneys. Before it advanced into a stage of being unable to eat & developed into fever & fever dreams, (of huge black and red moths winding silk threads around me - just like the threads around the woman in the collage and just like the moth at the bottom of the card) I made a journey to a church where things got really weird…
Even though I’d lived in Glasgow for years in the 1990s, I’d never been inside the Glasgow Cathedral. This pilgrimage kept taking me to the story of St Mungo the patron saint of Glasgow and I was particularly interested in the story of his mother Thenue who had been cast out of her home and village as a witch. I love stained glass and historic architecture and this cathedral was the resting place of St Mungo held in the lower crypt of the church.
Glasgow Cathedral is the oldest surviving church in Scotland but it wasn’t on my list to visit at all. And yet, here I was. When I stepped inside it, the energy was very odd. I soon realised it was a church on top of a church on top of a church. The original building that had been set up by Mungo was built over in 6th century and then finally the huge cathedral that we see now was begun in the 13th century. It is one of only 2 cathedrals that survived the reformation in Scotland - the miracle is that it is still standing at all.
As I made my way down deeper and deeper into crypt where Mungo is held I began to feel so weak I could hardly walk ( I still hadn’t worked out just how sick I was - ignoring all the signs). I noticed a strange feature in the far corner of the crypt and realised it was a well. I later found out that this holy well was the site of huge medieval pilgrimages and it was the well that drew Mungo to this place - they had built the cathedral around the well.
I then climbed stairs to the entrance of what is called Blackadder’s Aisle and on the threshold of stepping into this strange white room, I realised I couldn’t lift my feet. I could not walk a step further. I pretended to be fiddling with my camera as I was frozen in place on the stairs and people had to step around me, I was so freaked out I couldn’t work out what was happening. I looked up at the ceiling inside Blackadder’s Aisle and this is the face that looked down at me from the ancient beams.
I found I could move my legs again and slowly slowly made my way out of the cathedral. Out on the street, within minutes I could stand up straight and walk normally again.
When I got home from this pilgrimage I did the research and found that St Mungo’s shrine and well was the centre of pilgrimage in medieval Glasgow - my own ancestors who lived around Glasgow would have absolutely made this pilgrimage in their time. As I was writing this newsletter I began to research the significance of the Blackadder’s Aisle and why it had felt so completely different to the rest of the cathedral and found out that it had been built over an ancient graveyard linked to Mungo’s pilgrimage site at the well.
Whose feet had walked those same steps? Had I stepped into a memory held in the stones, the ghost of a pilgrim who had come seeking a cure for their crippled legs or illness? Had I met my own ancestor?
I will never know and I will never forget it. This pilgrimage as difficult as it was, helped me to create a completely new relationship to my body and health and I returned home to give up sugar completely and heal inflammation in my body. This shadow pilgrimage gave me a new life.
