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I grew up outside a small town close to southern Victoria’s Great Ocean Road in Australia. It was a quiet upbringing in close rapport with ocean, creeks, wind, rain, green cattle pasture, eucalypt forest and blackberry bushes.

In the years between then and now study and travel have taken up much of my adult life: study in France and China and travels through South East Asia, Europe, North America, China, Australia and New Zealand. I am currently nearing the end of a degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

For the most part my travels were a directionless, unbound time of exploration whose collective significance was to unravel later. Generally, it was whilst in nature that I felt a stir. Deserts, mountain ranges, forests, prairies and coastlines all seemed infused with a certain zing that penetrated. I would often feel wild and excited, immensely small and infinitely alone, yet somehow madly empowered with the sense of being connected to something overwhelmingly huge. Space and magnitude seemed to be places where I both lost and found self.

During this time of dabbling in life, drawings and paintings that emerged were unstructured, loose, casual, organic ramblings. As structure and focus found its way into my life, so too did my artworks become more structured, contained and focused, ultimately taking on the balanced composition typical of mandalas.

The external landscapes seemed to elicit a new sense of the internal. By the tail end of my gypsy rambles something had emerged: a new relationship with the world, a relationship based upon self in relation to something greater. Initially the ’something greater’ was the natural world, yet there was always a vague knowingness, a ghostly inkling of an ethereal greatness, an expansiveness, an existence that reached beyond the realms of the landscapes in which I found myself, (that reached beyond the earth and even the universe.)

We learn to speak a language. And then within that language many of us, perhaps on a spiritual journey or a journey of seeking meaning and a deeper sense of connection, try to find a language that better articulates and deepens our experience of communication about the world and its inner workings.

For myself Buddhism, Taoism and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) seem to be languages that fill in many gaps and connect up many pieces. Richly fed by its roots in Taoism, Buddhism and Confuscionism, TCM is a system based upon the interrelationships and interdependence of, not only phenomena within the human body, but all phenomena within existence. It is a wholistic, multidimensional, healing modality that is, for myself, rich in imagery and pattern.

Both my mandalas and my training in TCM aim to increase a closer communion with the web that harmonises and unites self with all within existence, they are my peace-offerings to the world.