A Feeling in the Body
I’m writing this the day after, which is where I always want to catch it.
Last night was the DP2 Visual Arts exhibition. Eighteen months of work with most of these students arriving with no art background at all.
Every year, before the exhibition opens, I have a feeling about how it will land: not a prediction, something more instinctive than that, something I feel in my body. I don’t always fully understand but I know that when I see it, I knew long before it took place . Last year I had an unease in my body, something not quite right, and the students built caves: pockets of raw emotion, constructed sanctuaries, immersive spaces asking to be entered rather than viewed. My body had already received something about what the year was holding before the exhibition made it visible.
This is not coincidence. Since I began my deeper Jungian work in 2022, I have watched each cohort go further into this territory than the last. It is a gradual unfolding, not a series of revelations. I trust it completely and I don’t doubt it for a minute. I don’t need a single moment of proof: I see it accumulating across the eighteen months in the studio, in the conversations, in the way the work develops, and then I watch it confirmed on the exhibition night. Students excitedly tell me that they learned more about their own work from talking to the audience than from making it. Of course they did. Once a work is displayed, the artist no longer owns its meaning: the viewer adds to it, extends it, takes it somewhere the artist never went. The students watched that happening in real time last night, and the work grew in front of them with every interaction.
When the Work Reaches Further Than You Planned
One moment from last night is especially important. One of my artist-students, Mazin, was curating his installation to my partner and me – a space built around the seven chakras, each element a different energy centre, the whole room an invitation to slow down and arrive somewhere. Whilst he was talking, another student came into the space. I watched him enter the tent at the centre of the installation and lie down inside it, and I heard him sigh deeply. I named what the space was offering: that it was safe, a place of return, somewhere he could surrender. The tent was built like a childhood sanctuary with chairs draped in sheets, childhood objects inside, the kind of space a child makes when the world outside needs shutting out for a while. Something in it clearly reached past his defences before his mind could catch up. He wasn’t just lying in an artwork, he had gone somewhere inside himself. He stayed with it, speaking in fragments about lost friends, as if the space was holding him. He said he could feel them, that it was so strong. I suggested he talk with them, that this was where he could meet them. He curled up on the soft cushions and I let him be.
I was using, without planning to, the approach from my own somatic session two days earlier. What had just been worked through in me became immediately available as a way of being present with someone else. That is what inner work does when it is genuinely integrated: it doesn’t stay private. It moves.
Mazin’s work created the conditions for that moment. That is what art is for.
Installation view, Mazin Mejia, 2026
And my heart sank.
I’ve been thinking about this alongside a reaction I had this week that I think is worth sharing. I came across a post from a school proudly sharing their Visual Arts exhibition. The work was technically flawless, beautifully rendered, with every piece looking like it could have been made by the same pair of hands. The teacher, a DP Principal Examiner, shared it with visible pride.
And my heart sank.
I am learning, through the somatic healing work I have recently begun, that there are parts of me – wounds, really – that carry their own memory. They activate as feelings in the body before the mind has caught up. The work is teaching me to go towards these moments rather than past them, to ask what each part is carrying, to give it a voice rather than managing it into silence. So when my heart sank, I went towards it.
Was it jealousy? I checked. No, the feeling was frustration. A specific, located frustration I have carried for thirty years, rooted in something I hadn’t fully reached until now.
I was one of those students, the ones who could draw accurately, render precisely, produce work that impressed. And my art education did what most art education did: it reinforced that, celebrated it, telling me – implicitly and explicitly – that this was what art was. It also told everyone else in the art room – the other twenty-two students who didn’t have that particular technical flair – that they were weaker artists, or more specifically, not artists at all.
Art education, for most of my schooling, was aimed at perhaps three students in a class of twenty-five. Taking art at pre-university level was for students heading into creative careers, or for those who weren’t considered strong elsewhere. You either had the gift or you didn’t.
Thirty Years to Get Here
It has taken me thirty years to undo what that education built in me. I recognise now that this was inner work too, even before I had language for it: confronting the ego, telling it that it didn’t need to protect me through the identity of being the talented one, the one who with a ‘given gift’. Dismantling that took decades; this work is not fast.
Yes, thirty years to understand that technical skill in the service of replication is not the same thing as art, and that accuracy is not inquiry. Thirty years to understand that the student who couldn’t draw a circle might have had more to say than I did, if anyone had created the conditions for them to say it.
This is why my whole body screams when I see polished, performative work held up as the measure of success in this subject. Teaching students that this is what makes them a good artist doesn’t just miss the point, it actively harms them. It tells them that what they are inside doesn’t matter, that the measure of their worth is the surface they can produce. It reproduces exactly what was done to those twenty-two other students in my class who were told they weren’t artists, and it does it with a further education stamp on it.
The disservice isn’t just pedagogical; it’s personal. It says: your inner world is not the material here. Learn to perform instead.
A selection of student work from the exhibition
The skill in last night’s exhibition is real. You can look at it and see that clearly. But it developed because the work demanded it – each student needed it to follow through on what was emerging from inside the inquiry. That is a completely different relationship to making than anything I used to do.
I used to teach students to draw technically. They would spend hours carefully copying a photograph, producing work that was genuinely impressive. And then I would see their free drawings – loose, instinctive, alive – and it was like looking at a completely different person. I started to question how much they had really understood, and more than that, how much of themselves had actually been in the room.
Technique in Service of Inquiry
I still teach technique. We work on composition, visual weighting, how materials behave, how decisions operate visually. But it meets students where they are – responsive to what is already emerging in the work, not imposed before it has a chance to speak. If a student asks how to resolve an area, we look at it together. If a creative encounter calls for a specific skill, we go there. The difference is that technique serves the inquiry rather than leading it. And I have learned to hold back at the right moments, because if I push technical instruction when something real is emerging from the unconscious, the ego steps in and shuts it down. Just like that.
So yes, some students’ exhibitions don’t have the strongest technical skills, but the work is honest. They have found themselves through it and I would rather that every time than teach them to perform technique in favour of transformation. For me, it is not even a close call.
The Teacher Has to Be in It Too
I went into this exhibition having just reached a new layer in my own inner work. I share my psychological journey with my students deliberately and carefully; what I bring into the room is always selected and framed as teaching, never raw. I am further along this path than they are, and my job is to show them that the path exists and keeps going. On Friday night, late in the studio, they asked me how my somatic session had gone. I told them what was useful for them to hear: that I had reached a new depth, that it was significant, and that I had still shown up. That last part is the teaching. You can carry something heavy and remain fully present and responsible. Awareness isn’t optional in this work, not for me, and not for the safety of the space I hold for them. These depths exist. There is always more, when you are ready for it. I wasn’t telling them to go there – that comes later, in the right container, with the right support – but I was letting them see that someone they trust has been there, and came back.
This is not incidental to the work. It is the work. You cannot guide students into genuine inner inquiry unless you are genuinely in it yourself: not as a strategy, but as a lived practice. When a teacher is actually doing this, students feel it. It moves into the work they make and outward into the people who encounter it.
Last night I stood in a room full of work that had come from somewhere real. Every piece. Every single one. That doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen without the teacher being in it too.
To remember. And to become.
This is the research I am living, and last night was a reminder of why it matters. Because it works, because young people, given this kind of space and this kind of invitation, go somewhere real. Every single one of them. Without exception.
More to come.