Epiphany number 367

Latest #peisleymemoir book is H O T
At art school 1984-89 I wanted to make work that said something about my potency, agency, sexuality, hunger. I made enquiries… looking to women artists and writers as role models. I had Gwen John , I had lots of battered , neurotic , punished female examples but few searingly powerful, sensual role models. I was naive in experience , really naive and didn’t have guides I recognised.
My own force has been nurtured in secret. Disguised . Kept safe this way from my own fear of madness and the denigration of others.
In this work my essential essence seeps through, in drawing, stone, words.
I had the content all along but it needed a form that could hold its diverse and sprawling nature.
I didn’t need anything finite but much like the way to orgasm itself, something that took me through the lilting unspecific lifts, nuances found on the way. Nothing static or given as an endpoint. A rolling out of mercurial moments.
Maybe decades later a spurt of power. Or many sweet eruptions.
The beginning of this journey is chartered in my books in @deserters currently being exhibited @oriel_y_bont_gallery_usw until September .
The exhibition is about Artists and illness. My #peisleymemoir project escorts me through the malestrom of #complexptsd .
I do wonder if the cultural legacy of an untethered sensual self is to automatically consider it a madness or a punishable offence. I needed a protected space to show it and the curators gave it to me.
I’m very proud of the work in @deserters2025 . It really says so much about how I’ve survived myself and is the bridge between a woman thought mad and a woman who is authentically alive. Trauma and sensual expression married somehow.
It’s so important because it’s so difficult to be self defining and to find one’s own way without enough in the world reflecting that we are ok as we are.
I will keep going with this journey. The endpoint will be when I’m gone. I want what I leave behind to say: be brave , rejoice, be glorious , be it, say it, experience it, make it. The world will not collapse if you express yourself. And more but that’s not written yet.