A little lighthouse – lit from the inside, in the fishing harbour.

21 years of New Blood Art – a gallery rooted in relationships, resilience, and the belief that real work endures.

What follows is a personal reflection on the recent years – the quiet survival, the reformation, the edge I’ve been walking. On the places that hold us when we’re rebuilding. And on the green that appears when the tide moves back.

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This one is a different story. It’s personal, real-time, and located in today. Because this isn’t just about looking back – it’s about curating art – forward. About holding the gallery carefully as we transform and make the shifts needed to hold integrity, as a living gallery.

And yes, this is beginning to feel a bit like Memento (the film with Guy Pierce that unfolds in two timelines: one in colour, shown in reverse chronological order, and one in black and white, shown in chronological order.) Likewise, we’re moving from two directions at once. I’m hoping they might join – these dispatches from the field, and the long story of New Blood Art..

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I think I was probably meant to be somewhere else by now.. But the signs don’t care about your plans. Last year was a bit like a zip with one too many thoughts inside. After someone close folded inward – bravely, devastatingly, the constellation shifted.

The emails still came of course. Meetings were booked. Business continued. Though I wasn’t quite in the same room anymore. A pulling away. And now the return – clear deliberate, and personal – like a tide that rises again with new clarity that comes from standing at the edge of something real.

Behind the scenes, a serious business dispute had placed New Blood Art under sustained financial pressure. As founder, that pressure changed the scale and geography of my life.

Before the beginning, just after the end, I was walking in the new forest (where I lived) – in that kind of misty rain. The crack of branches underfoot and a silence that lets something through. A word dropped in: Mousehole. Arriving fully formed. Already chosen. I’d heard the name before, somewhere, but it hadn’t come as memory. It was given. Not conjured, not recalled. Arrived through the silence in the forest after a passing.

And so I recognised it for what it was: Not a thought. A sign. A message.

I went home, opened Rightmove and saw a teeny flat had just been listed. I called and asked if I could make an offer. She said I’d need to see it first – but if I could get there by tomorrow, she wouldn’t show it to anyone else.

So I got in the car.. Postcode: 217 miles. Petrol gauge: 217 miles (if I’d needed another sign)

I drove. Slept at the Artist Residence in Penzance. Saw the flat early the next morning. Spartan, with stillness in the walls and the outline of a life no longer there. In the mismatched paint shapes where things once stood – a fridge, a cupboard, a cooker. Not just wear and tear. Traces. The memory of someone’s everyday – gone. And the not-so-faint smell of damp and old bravery, steeped into the walls.

I went to get breakfast.

There was a deeper knowing – beneath thought, beneath time – that had moved first and dropped an anchor there.

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And then, something else began. In a completely different place. A call back to life. New ground. Shared days. Quiet mornings. A new future unfolding.

It was alive. It was bright green.

It was brief green. It was solar yellow.

The weather changed. What had reached upwards would have to grow differently, not from the top, but from the root.

An anchor holds. The tiny brave flat – a little lighthouse lit from inside. Now with good heating and full of art. The holding place before the next build. The place between the places. Where the real work happens – in silence, mostly, clarity crystallising.

Arriving just before Christmas in a Cornish holiday village over winter reminded me of Northern Exposure – that 1990s series about a city doctor marooned in an Alaskan town where everyone spoke in archetypes and metaphors, like they’ve absorbed mythology through osmosis. Strange and slow and a bit enchanted. For once, I might not be the only one reading Jung in the bath.

The land itself here feels magical. There’s quartz everywhere – in the cliffs, whole boulders, in the water. Sparkling. Not metaphorically. Literally. To me, it feels like living on a crystal bed – something charged, protective, alive. It’s unreal. It’s real. And here’s that green again now. The kind of green that was always there. The kind of green that appears when the sea makes space. Bright, soft, almost neon. Coating the boulders on the sea bed. I’ve been noticing it on the rocks, in the pools, along the path edges. It shows up in the moss, the seaweed, the rock pools – anywhere the light catches something new. That early green of new growth. Chlorophyll-rich. Alive. There’s optimism in it,  hopeful and enduring.

This curation, whether the green is dominant or present as contrast – holds this energy. Alive, clear, and full of promise.

And through it all, the artists remain at the centre – each one with their own life, their own timing, their own unfolding. This has never been a gallery of trends. It’s a constellation of real people, making real work, often at the edge of things. Each piece carries a relationship, a moment in someone’s story, and a quiet act of belief in the artist. That’s what you’re part of when you collect from us.

To those who have – thank you. You’ve made this possible.