The North Remembers - Art and Embodied Imagination | An essay by Keith Hackwood
- aphillipsarts
- Jul 14
- 13 min read
Updated: Nov 10
The original version of this essay (The North Remembers - Dreaming Before The Ravenous Tide) was written to accompany an exhibition in Edinburgh, 2016. See the exhibitions page to view a pdf of the catalogue.
Introduction
I first met Andrew during his time as a student in Wales. One of my clearest memories of that period involves the black-and-white video made during the final year of his studies there, which involved him being bodily hauled across coal tips and slag heaps – the aptly named Slag Drag. Although distinct in form from the work we’re considering here, the sheer physicality of the piece, reminiscent of the Tibetan practice of kora (a pilgrimage journey made through circumambulation of a sacred peak or other object, performed entirely through prostrations) struck me as evidence of a deeply realised will in service and commitment to an artistic vision, as yet emergent, but nonetheless compelling and potent.
The Soul's Journey in Art
Visual art in a broadly Western tradition has as mixed a history as any other artefact of our perilous culture when it comes to considering the body. A couple of millennia of mostly Christian monotheism has conditioned us to experience the idea of the body as inherently problematic – perhaps today less as the repository of inherent and inescapable sin, and more through the rational-materialist distorting looking-glass, as a fallible machine. The driven strivings of biomedical practice allied to the objectifying causus belli of late Capitalism all but guarantee that we come to the body as strangers, despising or fearing, exaggerating or pathologising our own flesh (as well as each other’s’).
And it doesn’t stop there of course, to inhabit such an ambivalence of being has numerous other consequences – from the likely transcendent projection of purpose and meaning into a heavenly future (the religion of progress and techno utopia, anyone?), to the commodification of our presence in this particular place at this precise moment (postmodern flatlands, cultural relativism of a crippling degree), to a crushingly narrow and suffering-laden incapacity for the achieved skill of grief. To be plain, the body is the site of our deepest mystery, the home fled from but never yet dwelt with.
As the Psychologist James Hillman reminds us, paraphrasing Plotinus, we elected this body out of necessity as the circumstance most fitted to our soulmaking. That being the case, and the body, this body, being nothing other than the animate Earth taking a human shape for a while, how did we come to such an impoverished sense of the value of embodied being? Starvingly obese, like so many hungry-ghosts, we haunt the possibilities of things being otherwise with the numb familiarity of the throwaway self.
And so it tends for most moderns, Takers, as we are, in Daniel Quinn’s language, chronically half-lit and enmeshed in a soul-killing slough of anxiety. In such a circumstance, of course, much of what passes for art, as much of what we take to be life, might be better described as entertainment, or distraction, or the manifestations of the fissured narcissism of the times. This, I suggest, is the context in which Andrew Phillips’s art must be apprehended.
The Artist's Role
What is an artist anyway? And what does such a one do? Shall we agree with German artist Anselm Kiefer, an early influence on Phillips, that Life is an illusion. I am held together in the nothingness by art? Or could it be that, alongside art-as-glue-of-the-self, there is room for a more magically infused possibility, reclaiming the act of creation as a sorcerous intervention on behalf of belonging, of presencing, indeed of service, even healing? Could art, understood in such a way, be nothing less than an outpouring of esoteric love into an immanent form, and therefore, properly, an act of reverence and worship?
The words may jar our oh-so-post-religious sensibilities, but they speak truly, being etymologically rooted in the moment of ‘standing in awe of’ and ‘appreciating the worth of’. To my mind this points at the heart of any aesthetic experience, putting, so to speak, the ‘Ah!’ into Aesthetics – that sharp intake of breath that we associate with an initial encounter, be it of beauty or terror, revealing to us that for all our alienated discourse, we are at root, breath-beings available to the unknown through our capacity for wonder.
There’s a culturally appropriated term that resides in the Japanese Zen tradition (where it is called Shoshin), now most commonly encountered in Mindfulness courses, that goes like this; ‘in the mind of the beginner all possibilities are open, in the mind of the expert, few’. It has a pithy quality in defence of wonder, and it stands, I think, for a willingness to not-know, a properly radical act as it turns out, in a culture that is built upon and only rewards ‘competence’, or the shared illusion of competence, at least. I put it to you that Andrew Phillips, in his art-making, is an exemplary exponent of beginner’s mind, and that as a result, the works he makes themselves invite us to view them whilst unclenching our hearts and opening the fists of our minds.
Art and Embodied Imagination
This twin combination of eco-psychological awareness through embodiment, together with a specific honouring of beginner’s mind, allow the works to approach matters of significance and urgency, profound depth and enormous pain. In a certain sense, such pictures bear witness to the brokenness in ‘us’ that corrodes our relations with ‘it’, meaning the world, Nature. They hold the tensions of separation, whilst whispering of another way – but they refuse the easy option of an expert’s coronation, insisting instead upon staying in connection, going on and in with the unbearable. They are outliers of what healing might mean, what it might feel like.
No surprise then that perhaps Phillips’s best known image, Blood of the Earth with its magnificent double-peaked striated and sharded massif haloed with soft grey cloudforms against a gradedly lucent blue sky, and knee-deep in an ocean of vivid crimsoning blood, truly a ravenous tide, was chosen for publication in Dark Mountain, and as accompanying artwork for a review of Paul Kingsnorth’s Beast. A fitting call and response for those who care to know both works.
There is more going on here than we might notice at a casual glimpse. By having a knowable method, the threshold to the unknowable is rendered attainable. By neither buying into nor dismissing orthodox practice, having neither ‘object’ nor ‘idea’ of what it is he will draw or paint, but trusting the feeling-tone of ‘readiness to make’, Phillips leans on his evolving way of working, falls back on the wisdom of his body. We can benefit from the sharp eye of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty who notes, with devastating ease, that
"Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching."
There is a tangible sense of search in these images, not in the orange jumpsuited sense of search and rescue, though the starkly mountainous and sheer forms, often studded against frozen or wrathful seas evoke at some level the sheer scale and menace of bodily trepidation in the face of wild places, but deeper, less obvious, and far more extreme. It is as though these landscapes are not landscapes at all (and it is true that with notable exceptions, like the exquisite slashing monochrome meditation Waiting for Winter, which references a February travail through Glen Nevis, the images are not derived from physical topographical locations) but rather places within Anima Mundi, whispered of in dreams and approached not by polar expeditions, but by yearning, sincere hearts.
We must be alert to the possibility of falling into the trap James Hillman refers to as ‘the sin of literalism’ – a collapsing of the imagination and innate human possibility for imaginal, metaphorical, indeed mythic understanding into a ‘matter of fact’ - reductionist splitting and objectifying, primarily within the psyche, but then all-too-often projected onto the world.
These images both are and are not landscapes, ancestral layers and astral glimpses, they are also evanescent, vulnerable, intensely imbued with a spirit of place, but not physically tied to location. I am reminded of Cecil Collins, who painted mystery with enormous feeling and awe, also bringing alive as apparent landscapes the ancient plateaux and ranges of the soul itself. He wrote in The Vision of the Fool,
"We have to contact the centre of our being because there we have contact with the centre of the universe. Because we are cut off from our centre and from the centre of the universe we feel, and are, exiles imprisoned in the world of multiplicity and mere existence, longing to awake and journey back to the centre which is our heart and our Home. …the truth is that the secret desire of our heart is for (this) lost paradise."
Different landscapes in our sense of the world also speak to us differently, and here it serves us to consider the aspect of ‘North’ in Phillips’s work. Made on and of the chalklands of England’s South Downs, then nurtured and moulded in art school in South Wales (where his dissertation for his degree in Fine Art provides us with another clue - ‘Remedy in the Affliction: Beginning with the Wound’) the intervening years have slowly led the artist Northwards. Now resident in Edinburgh and producing works at a clip, in profound dialogue with the environment around him, nevertheless he maintains an awareness ‘that I am simply not of this land’.
The outsider, drawn North, there to see more clearly, to look further ‘into the beyond’ and, judging by the quality of light in many of his works, ‘into the dawn’. Cecil Collins once again offers a perspective:
"There is in my work predominantly the climate of dawn, of something being born, something new, and this dawn, as I sense it, is essentially to do with the unity of mankind. It’s obvious that we have reached the point in the world’s history when we have to unite or perish. And we have, ironically, the universal instruments of destruction–this is not an accident, this is wisdom. Man has to have fear to prompt him to realize that if he doesn’t unite, he’s finished."
Phillips’s work, entering a new phase of its maturity twenty-five years after Collins’s death, is perhaps even more acutely informed by that razors edge of peril, and the world as we have been used to knowing her shifts uneasily toward the Great Unravelling.
The Furthest North - Thresholds and Symbols
Let’s consider for a moment a specific work, Benighted Sea, in which a thrusting promontory of dark mass juts jaw-like out into, presumably, some northern sea. The image seems to read right-to-left, flipping the established and habituated line of progress – reading backwards perhaps, as Hillman might’ve said. Immediately we are set on an edge in ourselves, in the presence of something uncanny – a tension between the Freudian unheimlich and the longing for home. There are waves, it appears, but which way do they break? It feels as if they too flow right-to-left, moving out into the hinted at frigid vastness of oceanic waters.
And if that is so, then what is at our backs? Not, perhaps, the land we might have imagined, but instead, we feel in our own uneasy waves of not-quite-knowing, another vast expanse of sea. The jagged jawline connects to no skull, and all our tracking skills that led us to this find, become traceless and too unsubtle for the terrain we now stand upon. Like the Greeks who knew of Ultima Thule (Iceland? Greenland, Norway? Shetland?) but dared not sail there save by tremendous accident, as Pytheas (‘the arch-falsifier’) claimed to have done. The great Greek geographer Strabo noted ‘Concerning Thule, our historical information is still more uncertain, on account of its outside position; for Thule, of all the countries that are named, is set farthest north.’
These are our GPS co-ordinates, we are in a truly ‘outside position’ and certainly in this Benighted Sea we are ‘furthest North’. Phillips says of the work that he felt himself during its making to be ‘grasping at a particular visceral experience of landscape’. After ‘something eternal, deeply felt’. As his pastels shattered like brittle rock shales under the scrambling intensity of his grip, in pursuit of the image, yet in fear of falling precipitously away, he reports sensing a ‘destructive renewal’ and with it a ‘desire to be invigorated’. This seeming paradox perfectly expresses the benighted tone, is that the curvature of the Earth we glimpse on the horizon? Or an optical illusion, a bending and refracting of the light from the ‘Black Sun’, a meta-symbol that rises and sets in numerous of his drawings and works, hurling resonant darkness upon our gaze.
The Black Sun and the Secret of Our Time
This black sun is an image straight out of Anima Mundi, long known to occultists and often superficially smeared over with right-wing aspersions, the heart of the symbolic meaning pertains to order inverted, to life embodied without mediation, and therefore of power (as opposed to force). The Welsh artist Ceri Richards painted the symbol repeatedly as part of his seaside digestion of the cycle of nature, the ‘sombre germinating force’ as his friend Dylan Thomas called it, and also for its resonance in the 1940s with a new and terrifying master-image, the atomic mushroom cloud signifying the moment of humanity becoming truly ‘destroyers of worlds’.
Richards summed up his image in a famous work The Black Apple of Gower (Afal du Brogwyr) of which we feel a distant presence, I think, in Phillips’s Nightside, and especially The Beginning of the End. Richards surprised Carl Jung by sending the work to him, and in 1958 he received a letter wherein Jung, working through his perplexed initial feelings at this striking work unexpectedly landing in his study, says:
"The round thing is one of many. It is astonishingly filled with compressed corruption, abomination, and explosiveness. It is pure black substance, which the old alchemists called nigredo, that is: blackness, and understood as night, chaos, evil and the essence of corruption, yet the prima materia of gold, sun, and eternal incorruptibility. I understand your picture as a confession of the secret of our time."
Here is the rub, and literally so in the case not only of Phillips’s smashed pastels, but also, in The Beginning of the End a sort of gem within the crown-like mountain overlit by a radiant black sun. The ‘confession of the secret of our time’ can be understood at numerous levels – for Jung it referenced the individuation process seeking to alchemically interpose awareness of Self; for Richards it is ancestral and fecund but wrapped in the cursed apple of temptation, now made manifest as the Bomb. I think that for Phillips there is at once more darkness and, at least potentially, more light, in that here the Black Sun presides over a confluence of crises for life on Earth (take your pick from the menu of climate chaos, overpopulation, species extinction, habitat loss, sea level rise, and the old school favourites of plague, famine, war and soul-death) precisely as it hits the collective awareness.
The Artist and the Greater Light
What is an artist at a time like ours? Anselm Kiefer again (from a lecture ahead of his show Breaking the Vessels in Tel Aviv):
“What does the artist do? He draws connections. He ties the invisible threads between things. He dives into history, be it the history of mankind, the geological history of the Earth or the beginning and end of the manifest cosmos.”
And in the intensity of such a firestorm of creating and seeing through, other forces are operative. The poets say it like this, firstly from Rainer Maria Rilke’s notes of advice to creatives, Letter to a Young Poet: Firstly
“trust in what is difficult”and latterly“What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours.”
In his art practice and image making, as indeed in his therapeutic work and his music, Andrew Phillips seeks precisely that vast inner solitude, perhaps now more clearly identifiable as a ‘Northern’ form (think of Caspar David Friedrich’s sublime ice sheets, late Eric Ravilious or David McEown). An even greater poet, Jellaludin Rumi, puts it yet more simply still:
“Be like melting snow, wash yourself of yourself.”
In work such as this, at a time like ours, the pre-eminent risk to art manifests in the urge of ego to appropriate and deploy powers for which it is neither shaped, nor experienced, nor prepared. In washing yourself of yourself, like melting snow, a space is cleared within which the Self can operate, and from which a more eloquent and perfected art can arise.
A good description of this very process of creating, which I believe to be that of Andrew Phillips, is to be found in the Russian poet Boris Pasternak’s masterful novel, Dr Zhivago. Speaking of the very moment of egoless creativity he says:
“At such moments the correlation of the forces controlling the artist is, as it were, stood on its head. The ascendancy is no longer with the artist or the state of mind which he is trying to express, but with the Language, the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning, itself begins to speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward, audible sounds, but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow. Then, like the current of a mighty river polishing stones and turning wheels by its very movement, the flow of speech creates in passing, by the force of its own laws, rhyme and rhythm, and countless other forms and formations, still more important and until now undiscovered, unconsidered and unnamed.”
These pictures then, are some of those new “forms and formations” that have lain “undiscovered, unconsidered and unnamed” too long. It is imperative that they now begin to be seen and felt and wondered at, across all the forms that creative expression can take. The human condition as we currently have it, squeezed through the prism of our wrecked culture, is in desperate need of such mirrors to open us to the feelings they express, and awaken us to the action required.
I’ll conclude with a line from a letter written at the end of his life, by the great Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo:
“In the way that one treads with the greater Light above, even every difficulty gives its help and Night itself carries in it the burden of the Light that has to be.”
This is what the North remembers.
Keith Hackwood
Autumn Equinox, 2016
About the Author
Keith Hackwood is a psychotherapist, supervisor, and mindfulness guide in Newport, Wales. www.keithhackwood.com
Andrew Phillips is a Visual Artist, Psychotherapist, and Soul-oriented Creative Mentor in south Wales.
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