You moved to Australia eventually?
Eventually I moved permanently to Australia and through that process I started to connect with Aboriginal art through the local Aboriginal community.
I worked in architecture, between Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast, providing for my family, I was now married with children, and it was 9/11 – the terrible Twin Towers atrocity – which lead to me sitting at a table and drawing a Mandala, a circular drawing, and in the middle of the drawing was the outline of 96 people. I called it a Humandala.
I decided to produce this work as a performance piece, with would involve 96 human beings, and that took a lot of organising. On Australia Day, January 26th, 2002 we put on a huge performance, the aim of which was to challenge the concepts and ideas of Australia Day particularly the treatment of Aboriginal people.
I was able to get funding, I was able to get 96 volunteers, I was able to work with Aboriginal people, and we produced the piece, there was music and dance and it was filmed and it all worked out fantastically well.
I think it set something in concrete for me, ideas and themes about humanity and how people are treated. I still think it could be explored further.
What happens then?
I start working for the Brisbane City Council in their Sustainability Unit and I did that for three years. After working there, and I did find working for a huge bureaucratic enterprise quite depressing, I left and moved to the mountains near the Gold Coast, living in an eco-community, Beechmont, and I started to look into drawing again.
There was a small independent travel company there and I started working as a tour guide. I was trained up and I would take people on tours around Australia and we would also do international tours. On those longer tours, wherever we would stop and I had some time, I would play around with sketching. I would also try to teach people how to draw. I would show people how to look at buildings, for example, and show the people in the tour groups how to “see” them so that they could draw them, themselves.
Is that when you really start drawing and painting again?
There is something which has to be introduced at this point because it is important and it offers some explanation as to how I end up in Northern Ireland.
In 2016, I developed cancer and I required treatment. After the healing process, I came back to the UK and I was visiting friends in Belfast and I got sick again and had to have surgery. It is then that I start to really commit to painting again. I also retired around this time and that was another turning point regarding my art.