Carolyn Findlay - artist and clairvoyant

During the research for the project, I interviewed Carolyn Findlay, a clairvoyant and artist who lives in Somerset. Carolyn worked as a visual artist and used abstract painting to add another way of ‘seeing’ the information to her clairvoyant readings. We invited her to come and draw while we worked and rehearsed at the Phoenix Project in Glastonbury.

This proved to be the beginning of an extraordinary and unexpected collaboration. Carolyn hadn’t been involved in anything like it before, and neither had we; we engaged in intense communications and discussions around her perspective on the field of psi, and most importantly she translated, mapped, and shaped our devising process into another form.

Her abstract work was free, intimate, energetic and resonant, and it developed over the course of our project reflecting the maturing of psi: mid space.To start with she drew during our devising process, then came to Dartington College of Arts, to draw while we performed, so the audience experienced her ‘mapping’ of the live performance. Whenever Carolyn could, she joined us to work during our residencies, drawing in the performance space onto large sheets of paper on the wall; she drew our work in Glastonbury, Dartington, Exeter, at Quest and in Frome, her home town.

Using shape, colour, line and text, Carolyn mapped our work in a new and unexpected way; she layered in visual form, she ‘read’ our work, our actions and intentions, she ‘saw’ the connection between the audience and our performance. Carolyn’s interpretation onto paper of psi: mid space was a distinctive and beautiful contribution to the project.