Seventeen is a womb-like image. We are born and leave the Garden of Eden, a realm of support, nourishment and protection. Our birth is a great trauma. After that we grow and are exposed to every kind of danger and opportunity. Do we crave peace and protection, or do we embrace risk? Recently we have been bombarded with the statistics of risk, as if Covid-19 is the first time that we are in danger as a species. But every day is and always has been a danger. In this drawing a human being transforms from foetus into adult. It is a process that I have often captured in my art, even in large scale sculptures such as Emergence where a human being emerges from the earth into this life, into the light, air, danger and thrill of being alive. We are always living on the knife-edge, whether we know it or not. There is a great beauty, inevitability and an instinctive, unstoppable force that is life and growth, like some kind of vortex. But within all of us there is this memory of the peace of the womb, it comes back in moments of meditation, travel and sleep.
