:: My Blood Is Red Ochre But My Heart Is Made From Stars ::

This large format triptych attempts to express the totality of the human being in terms of the history of the human species from the first emergences of symbolic behaviour in the Middle Palaeolithic to the present day. Deriving from an original visionary experience of a transcendent bisexual human figure in a state of giving birth and bleeding from a cut in the arm, the work is a mandala of human experience which aims to transcend locality of culture, of individual and of time to create a detailed image of the human archetype.

The figure stands upon a representation of the Earth and Sky with an array of symbolism denoting variously... the life cycle of the human being from conception and birth to the grave and dissolution into the earth - a history and future of human social structures seen along the base of the work and informed by presiding deity figures of fire spirit, female, male and machine - perceptions of deity and gender and the sanctity of human life - a continuous line of human beings and their technologies walking from the Palaeolithic hills at the lower left into the Neolithic and Bronze Ages along the arm, industrial development across the shoulders and upward-pointing arm with a final figure gesturing into the sky and our future. This work was some ten months in the making and is a kind of composite of a number of dreams and visions to create a culmination of visionary experimentation and expression from which I hope to draw inspiration for many years to come.

Beneath the main image are two 'extractions' - in a sense the opposite of a study - whereby smaller images in the main work are extracted and elaborated upon after the main work has been completed. These express two aspects of the future of humankind in the machine spirit of networked lifeways and the possibilities of neurogenetic consciousness. Finally a digital reworking of this mandala can be seen at the base of the page. This was produced as a single edition digital print on cotton satin textile.