{"id":29458,"date":"2025-10-13T07:10:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T06:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/?p=29458"},"modified":"2026-03-15T21:06:04","modified_gmt":"2026-03-15T20:06:04","slug":"how-power-behaves-in-a-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/how-power-behaves-in-a-room\/","title":{"rendered":"How Power Behaves in a Room"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Physics of Witchcraft<\/em><\/p>\n

Had a dream last night that opened like a kind of initiation. I was somehow in a room with Louise Hay, the mind-body pioneer – perhaps you\u2019ve heard of her, \u00a0she was giving a demonstration on how light and the power of Reiki might move matter. Standing and facing an open window with the curtains drawn, her hands moved and the curtains moved too, though I thought the open window might have explained that\u2026<\/p>\n

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After her demonstration, I tried myself at a different window – a closed one, with silk curtains hanging in front. I put my hands underneath them and focused my energy, and the curtains billowed up into the air like Marilyn Monroe\u2019s dress or a hot-air balloon inflating before flight. It was fun! I could move my hands around, making billowy cloud shapes with the silk, which danced in the breeze I\u2019d conjured.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Then, suddenly, a shift: two familiar figures, now authoritative, told me to put some garden tools away – and to do it properly, they said. One picked up a rake and threw it into the air. It spun once, twice, and landed straight through a gap the width of a letterbox – an impossible shot. The scene had the air of a circus trick, something meant to impress a crowd.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I said,Well, if you\u2019re so worried about where they go, why don\u2019t you put them away yourself?<\/i>They weren\u2019t mine – I\u2019d never used them, and it wasn\u2019t my job to tidy away their tools. I walked away, left the room, and went outside into the fresh air. A man in a suit walked over and said:It\u2019s almost as if they had a problem with you having that kind of power, isn\u2019t it?<\/i>And I said – Yes! It\u2019s a bit like the witch hunt, isn\u2019t it?<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And then I was trying to get somewhere, to the airport, driving in the half\u2013light on an empty motorway and, not concentrating, I took the wrong road\u2026 lost the road\u2026 realised I was off track, found a little lay\u2013by or service station to do a U\u2013turn in and was now somehow on my feet, in that weird way that the dreamworld can shift states, and stumbled into a field of creative makers. The wrong turn had actually led me into the right field. A place where everyone was creating something: with wood, their hands, words, time. A creative service\u2013station\u2013like centre, people making all sorts of things\u2026 like a working studio – almost like a library or a co-working space for creativity. So I sat down and made something out of freshly cut sapling wood – a sort of object, a tree person. I didn\u2019t have time to wait for the wood itself to dry because that would\u2019ve taken months, so I couldn\u2019t paint it. But that was ok; because I liked the way it looked, being just its natural wood self.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Then another familiar figure, who seemed to be in charge, arrived and inspected my wooden object and said –Do you know what, we can put this one through as an academic assignment rather than an art project.<\/i>Which was confusing, because my unfinished wooden figure – the unpainted sapling – didn\u2019t need completion or to be signed off as a certain academically endorsed item; because, well, it was a creative, almost spiritual act that only needed air and time to cure. I didn\u2019t say anything, though, because they genuinely thought they were doing me a favour.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And through it all, the thread of travel – trying to reach the airport – transition. Being mid\u2013journey between containment and flight. Leaving the rooms where others decided how much unseen or creative power I could hold.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u22c5\u27e1\u22c5<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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Two emerging women artists whose work resonates with these unseen currents are Luo-Han Chen and Phoebe Hardwick.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Chen\u2019s paintings hold a sense of suspended potential – forms flicker at the edge of becoming, as if light and matter are remembering how to take shape. Her use of mineral pigment and silk keeps everything porous, alive to the movement between dissolution and emergence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Hardwick\u2019s women, by contrast, inhabit interiors where the body becomes a site of quiet resistance. Their hands, composed yet unsettled, holding the unsaid and transmitting something psychic, inward, withheld. In both artists\u2019 work, gesture becomes a kind of language: the visible world answering the invisible one.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u22c5\u27e1\u22c5<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A dream opened like an initiation: a force moving through my hands, then a room answering with impossible demonstrations and tasks. I walked out of that logic, took a wrong turn, and found the right field – a place of makers, where creation itself shaped the way forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":29459,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[542],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dispatches-from-the-field"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29458"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29474,"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29458\/revisions\/29474"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}