Wild Garlic was originally a short video sent to me, recorded on a phone, that has sat on my hard drive for a quite a while. I loved the shapes and movement of the wild garlic leaves and the spring birds singing in full throttle.

Through experimentation of sound and image, I created a short clip –

 But it seemed to remind me of something…

When I was a child I was given a kaleidoscope. A cardboard cylinder, that when you looked through towards the light and turned the end section, the tiny plastic beads contained within moved into a myriad of beautiful mandalas. Even the sound has remained with me all these years …a salt shaker sound….soft icy rain against the window at night…sand sifting from one container to another. This must have been the start of my love for mandalas, which I have been creating for many years both drawing and digitally. In a previous creative incarnation, as Soundician, I created many mandalas to represent the Aegean sea and used them in the video ‘Turquoise’ https://vimeo.com/76177170

A mandala (Sanskrit: मण्डल, romanized: mandala, lit. ’circle’, [ˈmɐɳɖɐlɐ]) is a geometric configuration of symbols. In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of practitioners and adepts, as a spiritual guidance tool, for establishing a sacred space and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. A mandala generally represents the spiritual journey, starting from outside to the inner core, through layers.

Lastly, I visited the Carolina Caycedo, Land of Friends exhibition at the Baltic 28 May 2022 – 29 January 2023 and was confronted by her large yellow videos of water burning like suns. I thought, how coincidental  that I had created similar work and both of us are artists engaged and concerned about environmental issues. Carolina Caycedo makes work that addresses the commons, environmental justice, just energy transition and cultural and environmental biodiversity.

The resulting artwork was created by taking images from the video and digitally processing them to create beautiful mandalas of kaleidoscopic colour. The idea is that the beauty of nature even tiny areas of woodland, where the wild garlic was found, are all parts of a integrated patchwork or layers of a mandala that fit together, working in conjunction with each other, in harmony.

I have continued to create mandalas and am experimenting with some of my own photographs of plants as well as creating new audio art based on the original soundtrack of Wild Garlic.

To be continued…