"When growing up, I had no plans to become an artist, it simply didn’t not occur me that this would or could be an option. However, life often has its own agenda that can sometimes run in opposition to what we think is best for us, and I feel that this is a rather wonderful thing.
This piece is based around a watershed experience in my life. It was late 2010 and I found myself amidst the biggest emotional, mental, spiritual, I suppose existential crisis of my life to that point. A life that I had built on shifting sands was beginning to crumble. However, in amongst all this turmoil, there was a moment where I found myself in the car in the midst of melting down, driving over to Hastings with my husband to have Sunday lunch with his Mum. I felt profoundly embarrassed to be in this state and overwhelmed with fear that I would breakdown crying at the dinner table; so it was with all this going on that I do what I always do when struggling and started to chant’ “NAM MYOHO RENGE KYO, NAM MYOHO RENGE KYO…” over and over again. All I wanted to do in that moment was keep myself together and not embarrass myself.
It was as we hit Hastings seafront that I ‘heard’ a very quiet inner voice speak; it said:
“The answer to your prayers lays within your current circumstance”.
My immediate response to this was “what a load of ****!” This was the worst point of my adult life, and yet I found another part of me agreed with this statement and I changed the focus of my chanting from denial of the experience of that moment to one of gratitude and it was at this moment that I felt as if I dropped through the surface of a polluted and rubbish strewn sea into the most beautiful clear water below. The experience was full of paradox, I had never experienced anything like it, and yet it was intimately familiar. It seemed to come from within and yet it also felt that it was coming from without. I had never felt such peace and security and yet outwardly, everything was so chaotic! Yet, this very clear message welled up from deep within me: EVERYTHING IS OK.
The intensity of this experience passed quickly, but the vestige of it remained for hours after (and I didn’t cry into my lunch). To cut a long story short, it was during the following year that I bought a large bag of scrap fabric from a dress shop and spent many, many hours sifting and sorting through the pile, not discarding anything and looking to see how I could produce the most personal value from each piece. I eventually made several small collages from these scraps, and the rest as they say, is history." Anthony Stevens