The birth of two new words
It was back in January 2026, after the initial post-Christmyth high of opening S42 in December of '25, that the signs of delayed grief after my mothers' death 9 months previously started to show.
I had a room full of boxes from all the furniture and stock that had arrived prior to opening, and I suddenly got the idea one day that it was this room that I needed to turn into some sort of meditation space. And so it slowly took shape; a small altar, singing bowls, and candles.
Chaos reigns!
While much of the paper and card here provided a rich source of art materials,
the room was cleared to make space for what was to become more than a meditation room.
"What is all this stuff I'm carrying?"
Once the space began to take shape, I could allow all the delayed grief to slowly surface, the childhood emotions that were never fully resolved and the processing of all the revelations that come up after someone dies. In that space the weight of all that I was carrying at times felt far to much, and I recall asking out loud as I was sat in the temple room one afternoon:
"What is all this stuff I'm carrying?"
And a second later a loudish but calm voice in my head - though I'm not sure whose - said a single word:
INTROVECTA
Nothing more, just that one word. I'd like to say it was a like a Eureka moment but I kind of brushed it off as it sounded like something familiar. I wrote it down and carried on with rest of the afternoon. Later, I thought I'd look up the word to see what it meant, though I had a rough idea that it sounded Latin, so I looked in a Latin dictionary I had.
Nothing in there. Went online and 'DuckDuckGo-ed' it first (rather than Googled it) and the same thing, nothing. Then I turned to Google, still nothing, but suggestions for words like introvert, introspection, and other intro- words.
It became apparent that vecta is a past participle of the Latin verb vehere, 'to carry'. And so in my mind the two words intro and vecta joined to create a word meaning carried within. It dawned on me that maybe I had somehow coined a new word.
A second after that thought, a sudden rush of thought led to the opposite word 'extrovecta' coming into my mind, thus birthing two new terms that I realised I could now define seeing as I couldn't at that point find any reference to their existence prior to that afternoon.
A couple of weeks passed, and I was repeating the words in my mind, giving them definitions, and seeing how they related to my own thoughts and emotions at the time, and shared this new discovery with a customer who seemed interested enough to listen the ramblings of an artist with too much time to spare during the February fallow period that often happens in retail. Incidentally, I haven't seen the customer since. I must have bamboozled them perhaps.
Anyway, I digress.
Trying on those words like a new coat and seeing how they fit, how well they wore and how they related to my work now became more of a focus, and to a large extent, a distraction from the intense grief/anger/depression I was feeling during the early spring.
I would write my thoughts in big gestural letters and symbols onto large pieces of brown packing paper with acrylic pens, then tear them all up and over print them, paint them and tear them some more before creating collages with the fragments of all this 'introvecta' that I had released from my mind in the form of what I've termed Introvectal Release, thus creating a corresponding 'extrovecta' through a process of transmuting that energy within into physical form without.
All of that introvecta
ended up contained within layers of cut and torn paper and textiles, in art works that slowly transformed over time as my emotional state oscillated wildly between a whole range of feelings.
