Surrogacy - It's all about the line...

At the same time as our surrogacy journey was commencing, I started school at The Learning Connexion.
I had been working as an artist for a couple of years, just doing my own thing, and fitting it in around my busy Army lifestyle. The creative beast inside me was growling louder as time passed, demanding to be fed. I knew this was going to be something that would require time, patience, and new experiences.


Creatively, up until that point, I had been harnessing the vast power within. I had kept the voice quiet, demanding it's adherence to my personal restrictions. But like wearing a pair of shoes that simply do not fit, that could not go on indefinitely. The time had come to feed the

growing creature inside, to pay homage to it's truth, and to honour it's magnitude.


My new life enabled this voyage of discovery. My art, from that point on, was intrinsically connected to this miracle child. This child of my soul.

I knew that somehow I wanted to, needed to use my visual voice to express what it was like, to undertake this incredibly complex journey to parenthood. Initially I was completely 'creatively constipated!'. So many ideas, so many thoughts and feelings were compacted inside that there seemed no way to make sense of them.

Release came when I found an old board that I had lying around in my studio. I picked up a pencil and drew a line. It was rough at first, but the more I just let my hand go and put my mind in to neutral, the surer the line became. It was perhaps the most important lesson I had learned to date.... stop thinking.

My problem has never been trying to come up with things to say with my art... my problem has been editing them down. For me, the most beautiful thing I have ever created (thus far at least), was this one simple unbroken line on an old piece of board.

The form, the line, is of our future. It is of this miracle of creation. It is of the three people needed to create this life. The proportions are in thirds, it can sit as a perfect line when viewed from three directions - (portrait, landscape up, and landscape down.) It reflects the simple wish to have a baby, the pureness of that desire, the koru of life in the womb, the breast in profile as the surrogate is the life giver but not the nurturer for this child's life, the pregnant form sits in the centre of the field of vision.... just as the surrogate and child sit in the centre of the parents world during that time of growth.

The universal complexity of life, in the simplicity of a line.