Eye on Gender

In the early nineties, when I was going through the major identity shift of my life and struggling to keep sane, I went back to school and began learning about horticulture, landscaping and design. It just about saved my life, put me on the ground, made me work with what is real - weather, soil, plants, water. And I discovered that I could draw, I began to be a designer.
A new life opened in front of me, a different person in a different world. One of my first commissions was for a large garden in Surrey, and the design I came up with was great. Well, it looked that way sometimes. Other times it looked mad. Who could I ask about this, who would tell me if I was on track or way off?

The answer came when I was reading a magazine in bed, which had an article on Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, who was being interviewed because he was re-publishing a book he had written some years before - Jung and the Art of Landscape, A Personal Experience. He was described as the leading landscape artist of the 20th century. Jellicoe was at that time in his nineties and was still working, which meant he'd been working at his art for more than seventy years.

Well, here was my guide. What he was up to was just my stuff - Jung and gardens. How could I get in touch with such a man? Well, after some traditional despairing, I just called directory enquiries and got his telephone number easily, which was a surprise, and then called it. He answered, and I told him what I was doing and how I needed some guidance. He was charming, and invited me to come and spend some time with him. It was all so simple. Those who ask will get, or at least if you don't ask you sure as well won't get nothing.
So I went up to his flat in Highgate in North London and we talked, about art, about gardens, about Jung and the subconscious, the collective consciousness as expressed in gardens, and we looked at the art of his friends like Ben Nicholson on his walls and he questioned me on what I could see in their art. I'd never done anything like this in my life, it was great.

Then we looked at my design. I felt a bit like a child at primary school. He spent some time looking at every detail, then announced, to my surprise, 'This design is on the fringes of true art.'

Blimey, I thought, and said, 'What?' He looked at me sharply and asked, 'Didn't you know you were an artist?'

No, I replied, I didn't. What, who, me?

Well, he responded, what did you think you were? 

This was the question of a life. What did I think I was? It was as clear as day that he considered what I thought I was to be far less significant than what I was. I left the old master and walked round Highgate as high as a kite. What a difference there was between what I thought I was and what I was! I had mined deep within myself and brought the truth of what I was in the heart to be what I was in my daily life. My goodness, I am a woman artist.

So it is evident to me that gender exists in the centre of our being, and that tied in with gender identity are other qualities, such as being an a landscape artist, that may be hidden as treasure along with what we think our gender might be. This could apply to us all, after all, who told us how to be a girl or a boy, and how far might we be from our real being? It's all about the gender stereotype, the expectations of what it is to be a man or woman or something else entirely.

Heady stuff, and well worth looking into.

The picture, by the way, is of one of my garden designs, the best thing I ever did, up in the hills of Wales at my great friend Peter's house. There is a huge pool next to the house, heart shaped and thirty five feet across, with a hundred tons of large rocks around it, a shrine to the Goddess made out of a giant triple spiral and a forest of telegraph poles, and a circle of rocks made according to ancient geometry. The planting is mostly green, based on tall bamboos which finally got used to the weather and are now magnificent.

And the picture next to it is me, Persia West, gap toothed, in the house attached to the garden. Another work of art I created out of something deep in my own subconscious. The most interesting point for me is this; clearly I am not just an artist, or a woman in the world, as both were hidden by a host of ideas that did not match my reality, so this means I am something else, which was the creator of both, made out of feelings in the heart of me that is something beyond all these definitions. And if I am, so is everyone else. But what is that something?