manifesto

I don't know how the world works. I only know that it's magic. I know that time is an illusion and that there is only forever. I know that a wild fire is a sign, as is the long soft gaze of a deer, and looking down to find the perfect stone at your feet. I know the dead want to speak to the living. I know that dreamers can travel through other dimensions. I know that nature heals, and so does love, and that laughter is medicine, and so is taking off your clothes and dancing around a tree in the moonlight.
These things have always been true, and true things connect us to every other creature on earth. As it was in the beginning, it is now, and ever shall be.
Our ancestors lived in a world brimming with magic and meaning, and so do we. They ventured deep into the velvet darkness of the cave, to secret, sacred places, and made images that call to us through thousands of years. Living images of bison, reindeer, horses. And also abstract images of stars, circles, handprints, zigzags.
Those abstract marks have been ignored for a long time.
I've been learning about Paleolithic art for many years now and last year I finally made a pilgrimage to see some original cave art in the Dordogne. Whilst there, I had a dream that I was invited to make art with my ancestors. I stood in the cave and looked at the rock by flame-light until I had a vision of what I was to paint: a reindeer. It seemed strange, childish, and clumsy compared to my ancestors’ beautiful dynamic paintings. But it was the vision given to me, and I rendered it as faithfully as I could. When I had finished painting, the ancestors gathered around, watching the image in the light of their torches, and when the reindeer began to move in the light, the ancestors cried, “It works! It works!” It was accepted as an image of power. And they began to dance.
After leaving France, I read Genevieve von Petzinger's book, The First Signs, where she describes her work collating and categorising the 32 geometric signs that appear across Ice Age Europe. They appear consistently between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, all across Europe, but until recently, no one has investigated their meanings. My work aims to contribute to this investigation of meaning, and through the investigation, to invite re-enchantment of the world and ourselves.
I believe that each sign should be treated as a portal. A door that opens into the deep past and to our ancestors of many thousands of years ago. Each sign is a node in a fractallising system of stories and meaning, and by entering one of these nodes, we can enter into that system and watch the meanings unravel before us.
I have no formal art training, but have been called to be an artist for as long as I remember. As a child, I moved fluidly between worlds. I could daydream, lucid dream, travel inside books and images and sounds. At night before I fell asleep I always heard music — complex symphonies that no one else could hear. As I got older, my life became more stupid, and I stopped spending so much time in other dimensions. I turned to writing instead, and over thirty years wrote short stories and novels dealing with visions of other dimensions, the inner lives of objects, themes of childhood, the gothic. My fiction has been compared to Angela Carter and Shirley Jackson. I’ve been nominated for five British Fantasy Awards across four categories, and won the Short Fiction award in 2017. I’ve published two short story collections and a novella with award-winning independent presses.
In 2023, I was invited to a residency in Finland, and my art-making shifted back towards the visual. I began writing less, drawing and painting more. During a second, longer residency in 2024/25, I encountered Elanora — an entity that had attached itself to another resident painter — and began a series of paintings and collages combined with text that seemed to tell part of her story. I'd had no intention of painting a supernatural entity. These things happen.
My work now sits at the intersection of dreamwork, ancestral connection, and deep time. I work with dreams and visions, random marks, ink and paint. I like to find creatures or signs inside seemingly random shapes. I like deliberately entangling words into detailed drawings. I like images that contain multiple potential points of interest or story possibilities. My best work comes when I'm able to create a daily rhythm of waking and dreaming inside a vision — when the 'real world' is excluded to some extent, and I can create pockets of timelessness. In my fiction I understood that I was not inventing stories from my own mind; my role was to align myself so that the stories could come through me. Now I believe it is the Ancestors who wish to speak, and that I am being called to become a channel for their dreams and messages for the present.
Divine words are written on the Earth, but we have forgotten how to read. We no longer hear the thunder in the mountains or see the force that pushes green tendrils out of the earth. Our dead have been forgotten, their spirits wandering untethered. But they left us so many signs, so many images to call us back.
My work is to contribute to the re-enchantment of the earth. The point is not to prove that a certain sign means a certain distinct thing — although how wonderful it would be to know — but to practise an enchantment upon ourselves, the earth, and the others around us. My vision is of a dwelling where artists and dreamers can come and be resident, with studio space for art-making and a cave in the woods to time travel into the deep past. It’s a vision of an ancestral hearth, a storytelling fire, and a deep connection to the Dead.
This is the work I’ve been called to do, and everything I’ve made in the past five decades has led me towards this. I want to contribute to the project of re-enchanting the world, which is a project of re-enchanting ourselves. Which at heart is simply a matter of remembering who we are, what the world is, and why we are here. We are already enchanted. The world is already magic. By the dark of the cave and the light of the fire, we will remember..