Reflection

I have been asked a few times now how being involved with this project has affected my practise. On the first occasion I said ''ask me in two years time''.
  The answer clipped me 'round the ear recently. I had initially tried to produce a kind of 'chaine operatoire' or sequence of events which would lead to an answer. What I made was a pile of sticky notes. It was only this summer that I then felt my answer as a delayed reaction to events.
  As a sensitive soul I feel like one of those old fibre optic ornaments with tiny filament antennae responding to all stimuli around me. When overwhelmed (often) they tend to flatten down so that I can function until 'rebooting' in safety. A new environment will induce this response and so it was with observing surgery.
 The building in itself was a big challenge and I could say a great deal about the inhumanity of large buildings. Then the newby experience of orienting myself  and my 'self' to a new and alien environment. Watching the mechanics of surgery is utterly absorbing and informative and then there is the anti climactic feeling of coming out into the real world afterwards; all these were more than enough to stop me processing something else.
  Over the summer everyone was away and I turned my mind to creating work for the project and then the download began. What became sparklingly clear to me was what a deeply profound experience it is to be in a room with so many people healing another. The energy coming from them is intense.
  Barbara Hepworth spent time as a surgical observer and spoke of the 'unity of purpose'. It is a transcendent experience to be near or in the presence of focused healing energy and it is a lasting one.
  I realise too that this is what I have physically felt from surgeons hands. At first I was puzzled by their touch. When entering a lift or an 'after you' moment in a hallway I would feel their guiding hand on me and really felt that hand. What I was experiencing was their healing energy and it is an extraordinary thing. It was all so obvious but masked by the unfamiliarity of their environment and my struggling sensitivity. Hepworth also wrote about 'things felt but not seen' and now I understand what she meant.

(quotes from Barbara Hepworths letter to Herbert Read, 6.3.48)