“Walk on air against your better judgement” These words are written on the tomb of the poet Seamus Heaney. To me this means - have faith, and take responsibility for your self. On the side of the house in Belfast where he lived as a child are now written in monumental letters DO NOT BE AFRAID.

Similar glimpses of insight have shone into me during a now long term collaboration with the scientist Kostya Novoselov. Since making the art work Am I My Brother’s Keeper? - a work about home and identity that took me several years - we have been working on a joint project Everything is Connected underlining the fact that everything is connected. We do this through a conceptual body of work that aims to illustrate in every way possible, and all through the world, that if everything is connected we might as well behave better towards one another and towards the world we live in - if only for practical reasons (!)

I used to think I had no truck with functional explanations but a better understanding of mathematics has brought me to the same metaphysical conclusion as Seamus Heaney. Through long discussions with Kostya about chaos and harmony, truth and what might be the purpose of our existence, I have been trying to see on what facts can we base any understanding of our universe and our place in it. If, as Marcus Aurelius says, “our life is what our thoughts make it” - what are the facts on which we can base our thinking? Take for example the irrational numbers pi and Euler, which each individually go on into infinity and are without any rationality at all, by definition perhaps then ‘chaotic’. Well if you add these two numbers, in any formulation of them, they fall in to order. They create simple, harmonious numbers, eg -1 in the example illustrated here in colour code. Thus letters and numbers and their expression of the harmonious concept of free will have set me down gently in a new inner world. Paradoxically these things began to make themselves clear to me during the period of the onset of the coronavirus in March last year. The helplessness and perplexity of the human race seemed ever more entangled. On the television we witnessed one human being slowly stamp the breath out of a fellow man. Donald Trump, democratically elected by more than half the US population, filled the papers and airwaves with divisive falsehoods, underlining the worst in many of us, misrepresenting himself and others and sucking the hope out of politics.

Yet conversely magic was everywhere. As Marina Warner writes in her review of Eliot Weinberger’s Angels and Saints, ‘by stitching together passages from different sections of life one creates, without inventing a word, a glorious startling tapestry of the marvellous’. As rioters stormed the Capitol, one million children in the UK were left at home without schooling for the lack of a computer or WiFi access, and people died in hospital without being able to hold the hands of loved ones, the papers were filled with recipes, origami kits, stories of communities pulled together around the elderly. Perhaps the new juxtapositions and unreal perspectives we have in and on our own circumstances, (as well as the proximity of death) has lit up ordinary activities with meaning. As Walter Benjamin points out in The Storyteller, when men and woman are imprisoned in repetitive tasks, ‘storytelling flourishes’.

This work, I Knew You Would Come Back to Me, circles back to Seamus Heaney again, the everyday that defines our existence. Even at moments of great despair, I have loved ordinary life, I have always known that that love will come back to me. Here too Heaney writes in memory of his mother in Clearances, recounting peeling potatoes, folding the sheets, laying a fire, encountering the other albeit for the fraction of a second, just being, while the clock ticks. This ordinariness is what defines us, and this is the sublime:

Theodor Adorno famously observed in Cultural Criticism and Society that ‘after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric’. Yet the sublime persists, beauty can and does exist alongside an innocent man like George Floyd being stopped and murdered on the street, the UK government creating a law in July 2020 to loan £1 billion to help countries with poor human rights records including Saudi Arabia and the Yemen, to buy weapons from us interest free, 72 million refugees, and young men being shot at by child snipers for fun during the war in Syria. Appreciating what we have in such a context is not just a gesture of political optimism - it is what life is all about.

Commonly one is brought up with an idea that the heavens are beyond or above us; perhaps even beyond our understanding. something to work towards. Poetry and art can bring us closer to the sublime, but as an artist living in this current natural world, no man made work can compare with the beauty of the smallest accident of nature. Nothing will stop the heart like the sun catching my son’s hair while he eats his breakfast, or hearing a bird sing while I lie in bed.