My mother Phyllis was a trailblazing creative. She graduated with a degree in Fine Art in 1945, and was a prolific watercolourist and full-time interior designer for the next seven decades. Growing up, life felt perpetually surrounded and infused by colour and texture and fragrance and vibrancy (and well, it was the ‘60s…)

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My sister Lisa was born with the tools of every conceivable medium and mode of creativity in her hands. I made my first art sitting at the kitchen table with her while she worked on school art projects. And later when she was in college. And then whenever and wherever I visited her as she moved residences, studios and jobs over the course of our lifetimes.

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I painted my way through secondary school. In the early 80s I had the great fortune to find myself in a dance class taught by a former student of Martha Graham in a small studio above a corner shop, an all-too-brief moment that seeded a lifetime. During those years I also discovered the gifts of printmaking and photography in college, but changed degree programmes from art to communication, and later pursued graduate studies in justice studies…

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An incident not too long after augured the beginning of my lifelong explorations and immersion in ‘alternative' medicines, therapeutic bodywork, and energetics. Around that time, my sister Ann found her healing hands and trained in massage and classic Chinese Medicine. What luck it was to be available for her to practice on as she accumulated the required experiential hours for her certification. Sharing our experiences and knowledge of everyday life healing practices has been a mainstay of our relationship ever since.

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In 2004, after many years of making glass, Lisa was off to Barcelona to do an immersive course led by glass artists she had worked with. Living in Ireland by then, I suggested meeting up while she was there. In the midst of trying to sort out dates, she paused: ‘Why don’t you just take the course with me?!’ A new door – the door – opened, although it would be many years before I would walk all the way through it.

 

Over the next 20 years, commitments to art, creative practices and ‘embodied knowledge-making’ found their ways into and eventually came to lead my activism and my university teaching and research. The traditions of critical pedagogy, participatory research and social practice art dovetailed in both my work and personal life journeys, blurring artificial separations between brain and heart, mind and spirit, fact and imagination, the material and the energetic.

 

And then one day, not too long ago, I stood, heart overflowing amidst 80 students sitting at tables full of discarded magazines from the local library, coloured pencils, crayons, pastels, markers and other random bits and pieces that accompanied me around campus in a small but heavy wheelie bag. The only sound was a cacophony of paper being torn (to make collages).  

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But at the centre of it I heard: 'You are the only one in this room not making any art...’

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The North Node, and all that is presented and offered on this site as part of this venture, were born from my personal journey of a re-turn to art and the intertwining, transformative energetics of art-, knowledge- and world-making it has given rise to.

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I welcome all who have found their ways here, may you find inspirations for yours.