This is the largest of my gold drawings and a big undertaking. Day on day at the table with my pencil. It is brimming with symbols from my childhood and background, some of these motifs go back hundreds or even thousands of years, part of a great chain in my family. The empty shirts are filled, each with a family. But I am looking over a vast sun filled landscape spanning the centuries. Different epochs are like cities reflected in lakes and ponds. Growing nearby are plants and fruits that represent different characters of human beings.
The land stretches away to infinity but rebounds with upside down bird- headed people. This is a reference to an illuminated manuscript in the British Museum that I sometimes go to see. Doubtless this is a source for my many drawings and paintings of human birds and birds' nests. There are vignettes of the many festivals that keep the cyclical nature of time flowing forever, the creation of humanity and animal species. I think of the use of vast swathes of time to create unbelievably complex organisms with memories of millennia.
I have connected strands of DNA and an image of the Ten Emanations. The spheres are images of my large steel sculpture Soul, commissioned for a Hospital where every day the world is saved entire by the saving of individual lives by courageous doctors and nurses. Time, history and ancestry have brought us to this present moment and we are alive and looking out at what is to come.
