Yesterday was the 10-10-202 – a day of auspicious numbers, activations and manifestations.

The night before, on the 9th October, I staged a Peace Activation. Together with a group of people who gathered to watch, I poured a huge world made from coloured paper pulp.

People asked if they could join in and during the hour of its creation, we made green forests and blue oceans, clean rivers and swirling clouds in this paper world. After we built the world we gathered for a short peaceful meditation and invoked the spirit of John Lennon and Yoko Ono for the annual lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower on Videy Island, near Reykjavik, Iceland which is held on October 9 each year.

I wanted to give people in my own community an experience of Iceland. My exhibition Fire & Ice at The Field gallery is the result of my Nes artist residency at Skagatsrönd, in Iceland where I spent October 2019. The Peace activation took place in the public space just outside the gallery in the M-Arts precinct in Murwillumbah. 

Before the night was over, several footprints appeared on the circle of paper pulp. When dry the paper would have holes in it and become unstable. So in the tradition of Japanese “kintsugi”, where the breakage or tear becomes part of the history of the object, I used blue pulp made from my friend’s jeans to infill the holes.

These blue footprints became part of the world, a metaphor of our very human and damaging ecological footprint. Yet these mended footprints will become an integral and beautiful part of our new world. In the Japanese “kintsugi” tradition broken ceramic pots and bowls are repaired with powdered gold or silver dust, a fracture imbuing even more meaning and beauty into the piece.

My friend whose jeans became the footprints, was unable to come to the peace activation but had lent me four ceramic candle holders she had made for the event. We lit candles inside them and placed them around our new world, bringing light to four corners of it.

These rituals and enactments carried through into the next day as we discussed where the paper world would live. We thought it should stay in the M-Arts precinct until December 8, the date when the Imagine Peace Tower light is extinguished for the year on the anniversary of John Lennon’s death. A local version of Yoko Ono’s Wishing tree will be installed next to it.

While our individual and community activations might seem small, in comparison to installing a huge Imagine Peace Tower with laser lights, these contribute to empowering ordinary people to take action and help dispel the miasma of overwhelm and hopelessness we can sometimes feel in the face of world catastrophe. 

If a pair of well loved jeans can be used to heal our ecological footprint, then let’s find more ways to mend the fractures we see everyday in our beautiful world. It may be as simple as picking up the rubbish you see lying in the street. Or gathering a group of people together to sing songs about peace. Let’s activate ourselves and become the thrown stones that are sending out activating ripples into our own families and communities. Together we are powerful.