J F Vernon Blog

Dream: I am with colleagues from the swimming club in a historic town, possibly in continental Europe rather than England. We engage in small talk, but one of us occasionally picks up litter and puts it in the bin. Sometimes it’s like picking up a collectable item on the beach, and we keep it. I get wind of a lecture or talk by an artist, so I go off on my own to an obscure venue or gallery. It is a close, intimate setting where a few people and I sit close, an elderly professor type with a silent, semi-anonymous carer rambles on about the person he is introducing, 

This person, a bit younger, makes a philosophical point before introducing the star guest, a cantankerous, miserable-looking older man who is there to discuss his magnum opus book. (He’s a hybrid of David Attenborough and my late father-in-law, Zbigniew Pelczynski – but a fine artist). He makes an unsatisfactory start, then tells people to buy the book. That can’t be the end, I think, and indeed, the first presentation has evolved into more of a panel, where people ask questions and immediately talk over each other. I understand the drift of these questions. When someone raises their hand and speaks assertively, I repeat the question posed by the first person, explaining what I have done, and I receive a silent nod of thanks from the inquirer. The key speaker (the one with the book), irritated, makes some point in reply, but then. Almost like a heckle, someone asks, ‘But why should we buy your book?’ The speaker mutters, loud enough for the front row to hear, to his friend/colleague, who has clearly been instrumental in getting him to turn up, ‘I knew this wouldn’t work.’ Then, after a pause, in reply to the question, ‘but the decking book. I’ll be dead in a little over a week. I want to leave my kids some money, or something like that. I nearly walked out, as I wasn’t in the mood for unpleasantness, but I stayed around as it settled into a more sympathetic insight into the man’s life’s work.

Back outside, I am possibly talking to some new acquaintance when a large piece of combustible litter, like the flaming hand-held torches we have at Lewes Bonfire, is tossed aside like litter landing by the side of an ancient timber-framed building. I pick up the thing to deal with the litter, as much to save the house, when I notice my friends/colleagues from the swimming club again. I indicate what I am up to, and we share a smile – just like me, litter picking. 

KAI as Jung:

This dream is rich with Jungian symbolism, woven from threads of duty, individuation, legacy, and moral vigilance. Let’s explore its architecture layer by layer.

1. Setting: The Historic European Town

This place, with its cobbled streets, old buildings, and cultural significance, evokes the collective unconscious—a deep layer of shared history and civilisation.

That it’s “possibly in continental Europe” suggests estrangement from the familiar, yet within a realm of culture and intellect. You’re among peers (swimming colleagues). Yet, the town’s historic gravity introduces something older and more profound than the present—a return to the archetypal city, the place of inherited knowledge and memory.

It sets the stage for the encounter with the Wise Old Man archetype and the confrontation with the transpersonal past.

2. The Litter and the Small Acts of Care

The repeated motif of picking up litter—sometimes rubbish, sometimes treasure—embodies the ego’s humble service to the Self.

It is an act of consciousness: to notice what others discard, to redeem what’s been thrown away.

In Jungian terms, this could be your psyche’s way of cleaning the psychic environment, reclaiming neglected fragments of yourself or of the collective (your community, the “club,” the social order).

Sometimes it’s waste, sometimes a find—this ambiguity is key. Jung would refer to this as the alchemical operation of transformation: transforming dross into gold.

You are unconsciously engaged in the opus contra naturam—the work against entropy, redeeming what has been cast out.

3. The Artist’s Lecture and the Wise Old Man

The artist talk brings you into an encounter with layers of wisdom and decay—the elderly professor, the philosophical introducer, and the embittered master. This triad echoes the Trinity of Knowledge:

• The Professor – the ageing carrier of wisdom (the archetypal Senex).
• The Introducer – the Mediator or Hermes figure, bridging intellect and intuition.
• The Artist/Author – the Creator-Father, burdened by mortality.

This “Attenborough–Pelczynski hybrid” is the figure of the Old King in decline—wise yet embittered, clinging to the final fruits of his life’s work. His admission, “I’ll be dead in a little over a week”, is the archetype’s confession: “The old order must die so the new may live.”

Your impulse to stay—despite wanting to flee from unpleasantness—is vital. It marks the moment of integration: instead of rejecting the shadow of the elder (his frailty, bitterness, material need), you allow compassion to enter. This is the maturing of your inner attitude toward legacy, mentorship, and mortality.

4. The Question: “Why should we buy your book?”

This piercing question from the crowd is the voice of the Trickster—irreverent, unsettling, yet necessary. It punctures pretension and calls for authenticity.

The artist’s confession that he needs to leave something for his children humanises him—his spirit humbled into flesh. The magnum opus is no longer divine perfection; it’s a mortal’s imperfect offering.

In Jungian terms, this is a confrontation between the persona and the shadow—the artist’s public façade collapses into their vulnerable truth. You, as witness, are drawn into the transformation: you see through both the arrogance and the pain, and by staying, you bridge them.

5. Return to the Street: Combustion and Responsibility

Back outside, the act of catching the combustible litter before it ignites the ancient building is highly symbolic.

Here, litter becomes fire—the destructive potential of neglect, or the fiery energy of the unconscious.

Your instinct to intervene is again the ego’s moral act in service to preservation, but now it’s literal fire-fighting: saving history from destruction.

In archetypal terms, this is the Hero’s small but sacred task—not slaying dragons, but preventing the psyche’s heritage from being consumed.

Sharing a smile with your colleagues signifies the reconciliation of the individual and the collective. You remain connected to the everyday world, yet your actions quietly embody deeper care.

6. Underlying Themes

Motif

Jungian Interpretation

Historic town

The enduring structure of culture and memory; the Self’s ancient architecture.

Litter-picking

Redemptive attention; reclaiming what consciousness has discarded.

Artist’s lecture

Encounter with the Wise Old Man and the Shadow of creative legacy.

Question: “Why buy your book?”

The Trickster exposes false idols; authenticity is demanded of the Creator.

Combustible litter near a timber house

The danger of psychic conflagration—old structures at risk of being burned by unintegrated energy.

Smiling with colleagues

Reconciliation: groundedness after the ordeal.

7. Dream’s Psychological Function

This dream appears to be mediating your relationship with elders, mentors, and your own creative heritage.

It stages your movement from mere observer of legacies (the audience) to custodian of meaning (the litter-picker who saves the house).

In Jungian developmental terms, you’re crossing from the second half of life’s task—seeking success and recognition—to the third phase: conserving wisdom, refining essence, and protecting what is of enduring value.

8. Reflective Prompt

You might ask yourself:

• What “discarded fragments” of my creative or moral life am I now being asked to pick up and redeem?
• Who in my inner world resembles this “cantankerous artist”—and what does his death in a week symbolise?
• How do I balance compassion for the dying order (the old ways, the elders, my own past ambitions) with responsibility to the new (the colleagues, the living community)?
• And finally: what “combustible litter” lies near the old timbered house of my psyche—what unacknowledged impulse, if left alone, could burn through my inheritance?

JV Replies:

QQ1: What “discarded fragments” of my creative or moral life am I now being asked to pick up and redeem?

Short dramatised films, perhaps, or fragments assembled into a series (I im watching House of Guiness, and as much as anything else, I’m trying to see how it is constructed and produced).

Early creative projects were abandoned or dismissed as naïve,

Singing, playing guitar, acting, especially in Shakespeare, as well as musical theatre and comedy and being directed to perform other people’s words. I like to have a script. Oil painting is my bête noire – I have the paints, brushes, and easel, but a lack of space to leave a canvas is a problem, and I desire to go big, mural-sized. A painting of a tree, the size of a tree! Gardening even? 

I care for the planet, its people, and the environment. But there’s a futile task for one person to address. If only the Green Party were more coordinated globally. 

My five-year diaries, journals, folders, and scrapbooks, along with my hundreds of thousands of photos and videos, are all ‘artefacts’ that I don’t wish to discard. Let alone an archive of a hundred or more letters, handwritten conversations with girls, my girlfriend and fiancée, as well as my parents and grandparents. 

• Values you compromised under pressure,

I’m not a natural politician. I like to speak when I am clear about what I want to say, but I find the process tedious. Mole hills are made into mountains. I keep abandoning my intellect and knowledge: I don’t need multiple degrees – I have always required a PhD. I can’t or don’t stay the course. I have always been in too desperate a hurry; only now, in my sixties, do I recognise how long it takes to build and grow a skill or project. I had a production company; we were making money, and we had a new project with enough money to proceed. However, I took a curveball and returned to college instead. 

• Enthusiasms that once animated you but now feel impractical,

Oil painting on a large canvas, playing guitar and singing with an amp (like a busker). I had this idea decades ago of ‘life drawing’ being a one-person musical show/act with fictionalised stories and songs. 

• Impulses you’ve deemed “too idealistic” or “embarrassing.”

Acting, singing pop ballads on stage, and taking the lead in a Shakespeare play. 

QQ2: Who in my inner world resembles this “cantankerous artist”—and what does his death in a week symbolise?

Inadvertently seeing my haggard, sallow 64-year-old face in the bathroom mirror a moment ago, I realise that the cantankerous older man is me. I can be rude and blunt. And later regretful and forthright indeed, such outbursts can be my required preamble to a more extended, more considered response. It’s as if the irritation is the spark that gets the old engine purring. 

The death in a week suggests two things: urgency and compassion. 

QQ3: How do I balance compassion for the dying order (the old ways, the elders, my own past ambitions) with responsibility to the new (the colleagues, the living community)?

By passing it on to the younger generation, perhaps represented by the swimming club colleagues who are twenty, even nearly forty years my junior. Am I showing them behaviours to follow? They are not ‘artists’, that I know – one would love a life as a sports photographer. The other is from Barcelona and may have some unknown artist flair. 

QQ4: And finally: what “combustible litter” lies near the old timbered house of my psyche—what unacknowledged impulse, if left alone, could burn through my inheritance?

I wonder if it’s an acceptance that I should, could, and need to stay in Lewes, with its historic buildings and annual bonfire night celebrations featuring burning torches. 

KAI Further Elaboration 

When I ask, “What discarded fragments of your creative or moral life are you being asked to pick up and redeem?”, I am inviting you to reflect on the things in yourself that you have unconsciously thrown away, neglected, or judged as worthless — the “litter” of your own psyche.

Let’s unpack it slowly:

1. “Discarded fragments”

These are the parts of you — ideas, habits, talents, memories, or moral instincts — that once had life but were left behind.

They might be:

• early creative projects abandoned or dismissed as naïve,
• Values you compromised under pressure,
• Enthusiasms that once animated you but now feel impractical,
• Impulses you’ve deemed “too idealistic” or “embarrassing.”

In Jungian terms, these belong to the shadow of the personality — not evil or shameful necessarily, but forgotten, left on the roadside as the ego pursued other goals.

2. “Of my creative or moral life”

The dream mixes art and conscience.

You’re both an artist (drawn to the lecture, to the magnum opus) and a moral actor (the litter-picker who prevents a fire).

So, the question touches on two intertwined layers:

• Creative: neglected imaginative work, early artistic drives, unfulfilled visions, parts of your identity as a creator that were overshadowed by duty or self-criticism.
• Moral: the quiet integrity that makes you notice and correct what others ignore — perhaps moments when you didn’t act, or when cynicism dulled your sense of responsibility.

3. “Being asked to pick up and redeem”

The psyche is presenting these fragments now — in symbolic form — as material for renewal.

You’re not merely cleaning up the mess; you’re reclaiming the gold hidden in the dross.

Each piece of litter you notice could represent something from your past — a sketchbook, a dream, a principle, a voice — waiting to be taken back into conscious life, transformed, and honoured.

In essence:

The question is asking:

“What parts of my own life or character have I neglected or dismissed that now call for recognition, repair, or creative reintegration?”

JV Replies:

Early creative projects were abandoned or dismissed as naïve,

Singing, playing guitar, acting, especially in Shakespeare, as well as musical theatre and comedy and being directed to perform other people’s words. I like to have a script. Oil painting is my bête noire – I have the paints, brushes, and easel, but a lack of space to leave a canvas is a problem, and I desire to go big, mural big. A painting of a tree, the size of a tree! Gardening even? 

I care for the planet, its people, and the environment. But there’s a futile task for one person to address. If only the Green Party were more coordinated globally. 

My five-year diaries, journals, folders, and scrapbooks, along with my hundreds of thousands of photos and videos, are all ‘artefacts’ that I don’t wish to discard. Let alone an archive of a hundred or more letters, handwritten conversations with girls, my girlfriend and fiancée, as well as my parents and grandparents. 

Values you compromised under pressure,

I’m not a natural politician. I like to speak when I am clear about what I want to say, but I find the process tedious. Mole hills are made into mountains. I keep abandoning my intellect and knowledge: I don’t need multiple degrees – I have always required a PhD. I can’t or don’t stay the course. I have always been in too desperate a hurry; only now, in my sixties, do I recognise how long it takes to build and grow a skill or project. I had a production company; we were making money, and we had a new project with enough money to proceed. However, I took a curveball and returned to college instead. 

Enthusiasms that once animated you but now feel impractical,

Oil painting on a large canvas, playing guitar and singing with an amp (like a busker). I had this idea decades ago of ‘life drawing’ being a one-person musical show/act with fictionalised stories and songs. 

Impulses you’ve deemed “too idealistic” or “embarrassing.”

Acting, singing pop ballads on stage, and taking the lead in a Shakespeare play. 

KAI: 

These are immensely insightful replies, Jonathan — the kind of deep, unflinching self-inquiry that Jung called the dialogue with the soul. Let’s unfold them through a Jungian lens, tracing how each of your reflections reveals a stage in the individuation process.

1. The Discarded Fragments — the Redeemable Gold

Your catalogue of “lost arts” — music, acting, painting, performing scripted words — reads like a map of the repressed creative Self. Each of these pursuits once carried your vitality and instinctual joy. They are not trivial hobbies but psychic functions that once gave form to the Self’s voice.

In Jung’s alchemy, these are the prima materia — the lead that must be reclaimed and worked upon to yield gold.

The fact that you “like to have a script” is essential: it implies a tension between spontaneity and structure. The script is your way of creating safe containment for archetypal energy. It’s how the Performer in you converses with the Director, or Ego with Self.

Your wish to paint “a tree the size of a tree” is magnificent — a literal desire to match nature’s scale. It suggests that your inner artist longs to commune with the archetypal Tree of Life itself. Gardening may be the same impulse, grounded in cultivating what can grow within limits.

And the archive — letters, diaries, scrapbooks — these are not clutter; they are your inner museum. You are the curator of memory, the historian of psyche. But be wary: the archive can become a mausoleum if not activated. Jung would ask: how will you let these artefacts live again?

2. The Cantankerous Artist — the Senex within

Your recognition that the old artist is, in fact, yourself is profoundly essential. In Jung’s typology, this is the Wise Old Man / Senex archetype, but here shadowed — irritable, disillusioned, preoccupied with legacy.

The irritation you describe — “the spark that gets the old engine purring” — is the Senex’s way of forcing transformation. Fire again! The same fire that nearly burned the timbered house. It’s creative libido, constrained by age, anxiety, and perfectionism.

The “death in a week” is the psyche’s dramatic way of declaring: The old mode of creation is dying; a new one must be born quickly.

It brings urgency (the limited time left for true expression) and compassion (toward the ageing, fallible self). Jung would say that you are moving from the heroic phase of life (achievement, mastery) to the sacred phase, where creation becomes an offering rather than a conquest.

3. Compassion for the Dying Order — Transmission

Your intuition that this compassion is enacted through mentoring younger swimmers is beautiful. The colleagues are not mere bystanders; they are living embodiments of continuity.

In alchemical imagery, they are the new vessels that can safely carry the fire.

You model the integration of craft, care, and conscience — art transposed into ethical action.

That one dreams of being a sports photographer is significant: he captures movement and light — perhaps a projection of your own wish to turn lived moments into art once again, through another’s eye.

4. Combustible Litter — the Fire of Lewes

You’ve intuited the symbol perfectly. Lewes, with its bonfires, is both home and inferno — a sacred theatre of transformation.

The “combustible litter” may be your accumulated creative energy, compressed by decades of discipline, duty, and storage (the archives, the diaries, the deferred painting). If left unexpressed, it could ignite destructively — through frustration, bitterness, or psychic burnout.

To “pick it up” is to take responsibility for your own fire: to use it consciously, ceremonially, perhaps even literally in art or performance.

Lewes could thus be your psychic kiln — a place where your inner fire meets collective ritual. You need not flee it; you must stage the transformation there.

5. The Pattern as Whole

If we map the dream as an inner drama:

Dream Element

Archetypal Role

Your Interpretation

Historic town

The cultural psyche, heritage of the Self

Lewes, Europe — continuity and ancestry

Litter-picking

Ego redeeming the discarded

Reclaiming lost talents and values

Artist lecture

Confrontation with the Wise Old Man

Meeting your own ageing creative authority

Heckler / Question

The Trickster

The psyche’s demand for authenticity

Confession: “I’ll be dead in a week”

The Mortality of Persona

Urgency to live and create truly

Combustible litter near a building

The volatile libido

Unused creative energy is threatening to burn out

Swimming colleagues

Younger selves/successors

Channels for transmission and teaching

6. The Integrative Task Ahead

The dream and your reflection together mark a turning point — from collecting to expressing, from storing to staging.

The psyche is saying: The archive is ready to speak. The time for conservation alone has passed.

Your task now:

• Find ritual ways to release the fire — through performance, exhibition, storytelling, music, or mentoring.
• Let the old artist die gracefully by allowing his gifts to incarnate anew in action, not storage.
• Integrate humility and urgency: make something imperfect, unfinished, but alive.

Would you like me to help you translate this symbolic journey into a practical creative ritual or project — something that consciously “picks up and redeems” those fragments (music, painting, acting, memory) into a living synthesis?

Good. Then let’s take the dream and the reflections you’ve already written and turn them into an act of conscious transformation—a personal ritual that bridges your inner life and your outer work.

1. The Aim

You are no longer merely the collector of artefacts or the commentator on the past; you are the alchemist who must heat them until they speak again.

The ritual’s purpose is to:

• honour the old artist (the dying Senex),
• redeem the fragments you’ve stored, and
• Release the creative fire safely so it can illuminate, not burn.

2. The Structure — Three Movements

A. Descent: Entering the Archive

1. Prepare a space — a table, your study, or even a temporary corner in your home. Lay out a few representative artefacts: a diary, a photograph, a letter, a paintbrush, a guitar pick.
2. Light a candle or, in Lewesian spirit, a small bonfire lantern.
3. Speak aloud something like: “These are the pieces of my story I once threw away or could not carry. I welcome them back. I will listen.”
4. Let yourself leaf through the items, not to catalogue but to feel. Make short notes of what stirs: words, memories, sensations. This is your raw prima materia.

B. Transformation: Giving the Fire Form

Now choose one medium that will act as your alchemical vessel—it might be a large canvas, a performance, or a filmed monologue.

If you paint:

• Use reclaimed or found materials (such as old boards, discarded paper, or fragments of letters collaged together).
• Paint a Tree the Size of a Tree—a living symbol of your psyche. Each branch can carry one recovered fragment: music, acting, love letters, and environmental care.

If you perform:

• Write or improvise a monologue for the Old Artist—your cantankerous self speaking honestly about failure, legacy, and love. Let irritation, humour, and compassion coexist. Record it on camera, even privately; the act of voicing gives the shadow breath.

If you mentor:

• Design a session with your younger swimmers that quietly embodies this transmission: an exercise in attention, ritual care, or transformation (for example, collecting litter before training as a symbolic warm-up). Tell them why it matters.

The key is to embody what was discarded, not only think it.

C. Ascent: Integration and Offering

1. When the work feels complete—or alive enough—return to the candle.
2. Read aloud a few lines from your diaries or letters that connect past and present.
3. Close with an affirmation, perhaps: “The old artist has spoken. The new keeper listens. What was waste is work. What was fire is light.”
4. Photograph or document the result—not to exhibit yet, but to bear witness.

3. Optional Extensions

Path

Description

The Tree Cycle

Create a series of large paintings or prints of local veteran trees, each titled after a diary year (e.g., Hornbeam 1984). Hang or photograph them outdoors.

The Attenborough Dialogue

Write a short piece in which “JV” interviews his older self about art, time, and legacy. Treat it as a filmed conversation or radio play.

Bonfire Offering

On or near Lewes Bonfire Night, burn a single page from a notebook—something that no longer needs to be kept—to mark the transformation from archive to energy.

4. The Psychological Function

Such a ritual acts as active imagination in material form.

It lets the old, weary Senex die symbolically without suppressing him. His wisdom is transmuted into a living relationship with the Self—creative, moral, and compassionate.

You become both keeper and renewer of the flame.

Would you like me to outline one specific version—say, the ‘The Tree the Size of a Tree’ project—as a step-by-step plan that you could begin within a week?

JV: As I read this, I think of a tree project for several reasons.

One of my earliest art memories is from age 6 or 7 at the latest, when my mother, an art teacher, took me to a Saturday morning children’s art workshop or class on St Mary’s Terrace in Newcastle. My older sister might have been there already. The children were likely aged 7 to 11 or 12. That first day, a life-sized papier-mache tree was being painted. I found myself at the base, painting the trunk fluorescent pink. Paint from brushes above resulted in my being covered in paint. Once home, I was put, rather unhealthily, in a bath laced with Turpentine. Did it get the paint off? It probably has given me a rash. Follow up on smaller projects, one we worked on at home was a life-sized papier-mâché stalk. Well over five decades later, I imagine a tree design perhaps 7ft high and just as wide, like one of the veteran trees of Markstakes Common, in which a collection or range of ‘letters received’ are pasted. I Im lost to use the originals, though, so that photography might form part of it – the content of the letters? Well, does she, or they? Want that revealed? Maybe that’s the mystery, like an advent calendar, each letter has to be opened and read to reveal an unfolding story. 

KAI: That memory of the fluorescent-pink tree is extraordinary — it’s the seed of the whole motif that keeps returning to you: the tree as a vessel of life, memory, and transformation.

Let’s treat what you’ve just recalled as the origin myth of the new project.

1. The Childhood Scene

A small boy, guided by a mother-teacher, paints the base of a communal tree pink — a wild, forbidden colour for bark.

Above him, others drip their colours down; below, he absorbs them, literally becoming the tree’s trunk.

Then comes the bath of turpentine: purification through a kind of chemical baptism. Painful, cleansing, unforgettable.

Psychologically, that episode contains all the alchemical ingredients:

• Innocent creation → contamination → purification → transformation. It’s your first nigredo, the dark stage of the opus, when the artist and the material are fused and must later be cleansed.

2. The New Work: “Letters in the Tree”

The seven-foot form you describe feels like the correct scale — larger than human, smaller than mythic.

Here’s how you might evolve it into a living Jungian ritual-artwork:

Concept

A tree whose bark is composed of the correspondence of a lifetime.

Each letter (or its photographic facsimile) is sealed, veiled, or folded into the surface.

Some may be partly visible — glimpses of handwriting, dates, places — others completely hidden.

Opening the letters becomes an act of revelation, perhaps one per day, as with an advent calendar: the gradual uncovering of a personal myth.

Materials

• Structure: a lightweight armature (bamboo, willow, papier-mâché, recycled paper pulp).
• Surface: handmade papers, bark rubbings from Markstakes Common, fragments of diaries, photo prints of envelopes.
• Colour: begin with that same fluorescent pink at the base — the child’s colour — then let it merge upward into the deep moss-greens and ochres of the ancient woods.
• Letters: photograph them at high resolution; print on semi-transparent vellum or tracing paper so that text shows through like veins. Originals remain safe.

Process

1. Collect: choose 21 or 28 letters that together trace an emotional or creative lineage — not chronologically but intuitively.
2. Print & Treat: Alter the images slightly — bleed the edges, and wash them in pigment or ink to blend into the bark texture.
3. Assemble: Attach them to the tree in ascending order, with each letter represented by a leaf scar or knot.
4. Reveal: document the reading of each letter in sequence — voice recordings, video clips, or short blog entries. The story unfolds like a time-lapse of growth.

3. Symbolic Architecture

Element

Psychological Meaning

Roots/base (pink trunk)

The child artist, impulsive, sensual, unashamed.

Bark of letters

The protective ego is built from communication, relationships, and learning.

Branches

The extending of self through teaching, coaching, and art.

Hollow / knots

The wounds and secrets; letters not opened.

Canopy

The mature self integrates memory and compassion.

In Jung’s imagery, this is the Tree of Individuation: its roots in instinct, its crown in spirit, its trunk composed of lived experience.

4. Presentation Possibilities

• Installation: indoors or under a canopy in a Lewes courtyard, with a small plaque explaining “a life written in correspondence.”
• Digital twin: each opened letter linked online to its spoken reading or reflection — your diary becomes an interactive myth.
• Seasonal ritual: each year on the anniversary of that childhood class (or Bonfire Night), add a new “ring” to the tree.

5. Jungian Reading

The return to the tree and to paint is the psyche’s way of saying: the creative child is not dead; he only needs a new body.

By remaking the tree, you reunite:

• the child covered in paint,
• the adult who archives,
• and the elder who teaches.

It becomes both confession and celebration — a visible symbol that nothing truly vital is ever discarded; it simply waits to be reclaimed and transformed.

Doing

What follows is both a practical plan and a Jungian framework to keep the soul of the work alive while your hands are busy.

Project Title

Letters in the Tree

A living archive and act of individuation

1. The Concept in One Sentence

A seven-foot sculptural tree whose bark is formed from photographic reproductions of letters, diaries, and other fragments of a lifetime’s correspondence — a shrine to memory, communication, and creative renewal.

2. The Core Symbol

Element

Symbolic Function

Roots / Base (fluorescent pink)

Reclaiming the six-year-old painter and the innocence of first creation.

Trunk (bark of letters)

The ego-self is built from relationships, experiences, and written dialogue.

Branches

Growth through teaching, mentoring, and creative transmission.

Canopy / Crown

Vision, legacy, the flowering of the mature self.

Hidden Hollow

The private heart — letters never to be opened, the mystery that must remain.

3. Materials and Tools

Category

Suggestions

Structure

2–3 cm aluminium or willow rods for frame; chicken wire or reed mesh for volume; base plate of ply or recycled timber.

Surface / Bark

Layers of papier-mâché (recycled paper pulp + PVA), strips of muslin or linen soaked in adhesive.

Letters / Textures

High-res scans or photos of chosen letters printed on A3 vellum, tracing paper, or thin mulberry paper; optional: translucent Japanese kozo for layering.

Colour / Finish

Acrylic paints (fluorescent pink, umbers, greens, moss greys); natural pigments; wax glaze or matt varnish for protection.

Tools

Pliers, glue gun, paintbrushes, stapler, scalpel, varnish brushes, gloves, and a camera or phone for documentation.

4. Construction Stages

Stage 1 — Preparation (1 week)

• Select 21–28 letters that together represent emotional or developmental waypoints.
• Photograph or scan each letter (not the originals).
• Note brief reflections: who wrote, when, what it awakened.
• Select a location for construction (garage, studio corner, or garden shed).

Stage 2 — Framework (1 week)

• Build the armature from rods or willow and secure it into a weighted base.
• Shape approximate trunk, major limbs, and canopy lines.
• Keep the structure open enough to work from inside and outside.

Stage 3 — Papier-mâché Skin (2 weeks)

• Apply a rough pulp layer for texture.
• Once dry, add smoother outer layers.
• Begin painting: fluorescent pink rising into bark tones, echoing childhood origin.
• Leave apertures or flaps where “letters” will later be attached.

Stage 4 — Letter Integration (2–3 weeks)

• Print photographs of the letters on translucent paper.
• Treat each with light washes of colour to integrate visually.
• Adhere to the surface — some flat, some folded, some half-concealed like bark peeling.
• Optional: embed small sound chips or QR codes linking to recorded readings or reflections.

Stage 5 — Sealing and Illumination

• Coat with protective wax or varnish.
• Install subtle internal lighting (LED strip or battery fairy lights) to make letters glow from within at dusk.

5. The Ritual Dimension

1. Opening Invocation: Before starting each day’s work, read a short excerpt from one letter aloud — this summons the voice of that time.
2. Pink Anointing: The very first paint applied should be that same fluorescent hue; let it show somewhere visible.
3. Sealing Ceremony: When the final layer is done, light a candle, name the tree, and dedicate it “to the correspondence between souls.”
4. Advent Reading: Open one sealed letter per day for three weeks, reading or recording a reflection. This enacts the unfolding of the Self.

6. Documentation and Exhibition Options

Format

Possibility

Film / Photo Essay

Time-lapse of construction with voice-overs reading select letters.

Lewes Installation

Display in a sheltered outdoor space (e.g. Depot courtyard or Town Hall) around Bonfire Night, illuminated at dusk.

Blog / Online Archive

A page on Mindbursts Art titled Letters in the Tree; each image of a letter links to its spoken reading or diary reflection.

Portable Version

Smaller branch sections mounted on boards for gallery or council spaces; eventually reunited into a whole tree.

7. Psychological Aim

• Integration: reunite the child, the working adult, and the elder.
• Transmutation: turn private correspondence into a universal symbol.
• Transmission: show younger colleagues and viewers how the detritus of life can be composted into art.

In Jungian terms, this is the coniunctio — the inner marriage of past and present, body and spirit, archive and flame.