Remembering the Beginning: The Spiritual in Art

“The space between inner feeling and faith is only that you consciously decide to step into the latter once you learn to “trust” the feeling, and then trust yourself”. Karen Mayo

Today, something unexpected happened.

In the middle of researching the methodology behind my artistic practice, I remembered a book that quietly changed the course of my life many years ago: Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky.

What surprised me wasn't simply remembering the book. It was realising that I had stopped consciously thinking about it because its ideas had become part of how I see the world. They had ceased to be influences and had simply become part of me.

That realisation has stayed with me all day.

It also reminded me that my intuitive practice didn't begin with photography, university, or my Master's degree. It began much earlier, in a spare room at home, long before I formally studied art.

Back then, I would sit quietly with a box of soft chalk pastels and large sheets of paper. I wasn't trying to create a picture of anything. I wasn't planning compositions or choosing colours. Instead, I would spend time in meditation, allowing myself to become still before making the first mark.

The work always began with movement.

Not movement towards an image, but movement itself.

The pastel would begin to travel across the page, following a rhythm I wasn't consciously directing. Colours would emerge without deliberate selection. Forms would slowly reveal themselves, sometimes remaining completely abstract, sometimes suggesting something more. Occasionally words would arrive alongside the drawings, carrying insights that felt less like thoughts and more like quiet recognitions.

Looking back now, I wonder if this was my first experience of what Kandinsky described as inner necessity.

Not an idea imposed upon the work, but something asking to come into form.

For me, the creative process has never felt like inventing something from nothing. It has always felt more like listening.

Listening before language.

Listening before certainty.

Listening before I know what is trying to emerge.

Many years later, while reading Kandinsky, I found words for something I had already been living. His writing didn't teach me how to work. It gave language to a way of working that was already quietly unfolding within me.

That feels like an important distinction.

More recently, while preparing to begin my new series Evolution, I experienced another deeply personal moment during a 9D breathwork meditation. In that stillness, an image appeared vividly in my awareness: three figures gradually merging into one. At the time I recognised the artwork but couldn't remember the artist's name. Only later did I realise it was Piet Mondrian's Evolution.

The experience was accompanied by an overwhelming sense of peace and a profound stillness in which I no longer felt the boundaries of my own body. I don't offer this as an explanation of reality or as something others should experience in the same way. I simply know that, for me, it carried deep personal significance.

Not long afterwards, the title Evolution arrived naturally for the body of work I was beginning.

Looking back, these moments now seem quietly connected.

They speak to a thread that has run through my practice for many years—a thread I hadn't consciously recognised because it had become part of the way I move through the world.

People often ask artists where ideas come from.

For me, they rarely arrive as finished concepts.

They emerge through stillness.

Through attention.

Through feeling.

Through a willingness to remain with uncertainty until something begins to reveal itself.

Everything that follows is grounded in the practical realities of making the work: the camera, the studio, the body, light, technology, materials and countless hours of experimentation. Yet beneath all of that lies something quieter.

A deep inner connection that has guided my practice from the very beginning.

Perhaps that is what I have always been searching for.

Or perhaps it has been gently guiding me all along.

As I continue researching the methodology behind my work, I find myself returning to one simple realisation:

Sometimes our greatest influences are not the books we read or the artists we admire.

Sometimes they are the ways we have quietly learned to listen.