“In 1977 I drew a Map of a world that didn’t yet exist. It was called Elsewhere.”

A world born from the depths of my childhood imagination. As the youngest of six, I found refuge in crafting fantastical realms, inspired by toy farms and circus collections. Dyslexia may have posed challenges in school, but in art, I discovered my true calling. A transformative journey through Scotland's wilderness ignited the landscapes of Elsewhere, setting the stage for a lifelong odyssey of creativity. From prestigious gallery exhibitions to captivating audiences worldwide with over 55,000 stories, my artistic voyage has now evolved into the written saga of Elsewhere. Join me on this enchanting adventure, as I unveil The Hidden Destiny – a tale of destiny, camaraderie, and the battle to save a world beyond imagination.

As a child I loved to play on my own in my room. It was there that I would engage with my imagination. At about seven I built a toy farm that covered all of my bedroom floor, it even went under the bed! By my ninth birthday, various family members realised my love for creating worlds. Between them, they bought me different parts of a Billy Smarts Circus collection: long trucks, all painted up in circus colours, lorries pulling trailers with circus people and wild animals, a huge circus tent with flags on top, a circus ring, and numerous performers. I particularly remember the woman who danced with horses.

By the time I was twelve, I would often sit at the kitchen table in the evenings and draw and draw from my imagination. Being what we now call dyslexic, meant school was a huge challenge at this time. Endless blackboards full of meaningless words. It was only when my Art teacher, Mr Swan, made sure that everyone in the class knew that there was something that I could do really well, I finally knew that I had found my space. As the class all watched me draw, I knew this would become a defining moment.

One summer, in my first year at Art College, I went to Scotland with a couple of friends, travelling from Bristol to the Cairngorms in an old Morris Minor.

One unforgettable day, my friends decided the weather was perfect for climbing up the sheer face of the mountain with ropes., As this was not my thing, I ventured into the nearby woods. I hadn’t walked very far when I found myself facing a dense layer of brown tree undergrowth. So I got down on my hands and knees and started crawling and after a couple of hours of exploring like this I began to realise I hadn’t a clue how far I had gone, or where this place might lead too. There were no paths or open stretches to see further views, just a dense forest. Just then I heard the sound of water nearby. I crawled towards the sound until ahead of me I saw the brightness of sunlight through the brown undergrowth and then spied a small clearing. Here, glistening with the sun on its back was a small babbling mountain stream, with its edges covered in a shimmering moss. There were fallen branches, deer antlers, rocks and mounds of forest floor, all of it green. It was a completely magical moment, a faerie scene that absolutely took my breath away.

Although I was pursuing a career in fashion and textiles at that time, everything I drew suggested my imaginative energy lay somewhere else. Five years after that adventure in Scotland I moved to Norfolk with Penny, where we set up a studio in Sheringham and I drew the original Map of Elsewhere. Then I started to paint in watercolour what that world might look like. The Illustration on the back of this book was one of those first paintings. The following year, in 1978, I began to make sculptures inspired by “Elsewhere”.

For the next couple of years, the most popular day of the week in the studio was Saturday – Kiln opening day. Tourists and collectors alike would come in to see what was coming out of the hot kiln that week, bagging what they could and often buying something they had seen me making the week before. It was all very personal and the collectors became like friends. Increasingly everything I made was for people I knew, which felt the way it should be.

At first, I made fantastical houses and faerie villages but after a couple of years I began creating the people who might live inside such abodes. The collectors were enthused as I started to make little Faeries or elves, who were about five inches high. Then I began to make goblins and wizards and it wasn’t long before dragons began to be made. By now I had discovered that porcelain was the perfect clay for my style: It was smooth and white and allowed me to work in great detail, painting gold, silver or lustres onto it, perfect for those dragons!

Initially, we only sold our work from the studio, but in 1985 we were fortunate enough to have an exhibition in Liberties then Harrods and finally at Charles de Temple, a very prestigious gallery in Piccadilly. Here the likes of Jim Henson and Elton John became owners of my work.

There were many collectors over the years and they were incredibly supportive in their enthusiasm for my sculptures and illustrations. Without their encouragement, I could never have continued to experiment and explore the possibilities of Porcelain. They were the bedrock of being able to make a living from my imagination, and I will always be hugely grateful to them.

Storytelling.

By 1993, Many of those collectors wanted to know the stories that informed my drawings and sculptures, so that spring I gave a story evening in my studio. It was the beginning of another long creative adventure. I was about to learn that to honour and tell a story well, a storyteller has to do much more than remember it, they also have to step inside the story, and experience its landscape and emotions. As a teller, you are taught to become everything in the story, we learn to inhabit the protagonist and their environment. We become the animal or a bird in the narrative. In short, everything inside the story comes to life. We learn to become nature, to be able to fly like the wind, be the flames of the Sun, or travel to where the Moon goes when she’s in darkness.

In the oral tradition there is a saying: It takes 10,000 hours to become a ‘real storyteller’. I think I total about 55,000. 55, 000 stories over a period of 30 years and to an audience of perhaps a tad over a quarter of a million. Along the way I became fascinated by instruments from other cultures, blending music into my stories, playing the African Harp and Imbera’s as well as a First Nation American cedarwood flute.

With this in mind, over the years I have told many stories from Northwest American tribal groups such as the Kwakiutl, Tlingit and Tsimshian. Here the flute enchants. I also became greatly interested in African dilemma folk tales and Siberian tribal myths along with a host of Russian and European wonder tales – blending music with such beautiful stories is such an honour.

Storytelling opened a whole new world of narratives and protagonists for me. Suddenly I saw such wonders in traditional stories, tales that were hundreds of years old came to life in front of me. Clearly, this art of the oral tradition was, unbeknown to me at the time, preparing the way to overcome dyslexia and start writing my own stories, the stories of Elsewhere.

The Map of Elsewhere and the Three Trilogies.

“Elsewhere” as a written world didn’t have a reality until in 2012 Clare, my wife, saw the Map and asked why I hadn’t written a book about the world that it depicted. When I explained that I was dyslexic and I couldn’t imagine how to turn it into a written world, she suggested that having been a full-time storyteller for nearly 20 years, perhaps now I would know how to write about Elsewhere.

So I began what turned out to be three years of writing, working every morning for four or five hours each day. Three years of this level of commitment created 400,000 words and left me with something resembling a huge adventure. It wasn’t a finished book yet, but it was a very big written adventure.

I didn’t really know what to do next but via LinkedIn I spotted an advertisement for a manuscript company in Australia that specialised in Fantasy. They were suitably far enough away for me not to worry about them reading my potentially terrible book. So, I sent them the manuscript and a week or so later I received a very unexpected and rather lovely question:
“Is there more? Please say there is…”
Tom Flood of Flood manuscripts then led me through the maze of the next few years as he helped me re-form that one big book into three manageable adventures.

The Hidden Destiny

The first half of the book follows the character of Findorian as he begins to discover his destiny through the early years of his life: From the death of his mother at his birth, to the vanishing of his father in a snowstorm when he’s eighteen years old.

In contrast, the second half of the book covers just two weeks, as Findorian discovers the greater world is waiting for him to wake up from his past and fight for the future that’s under threat for everyone. He realises that his destiny is bound to a whole host of people from all over “Elsewhere”, who are building together a great uprising against a tyrant seeking to destroy the world.
I have spent the first six months of 2023 preparing this first book of nine for publication, drawing together as I went, the narrative, illustrations and maps of the world of Elsewhere. It feels very exciting to have reached this stage with Book One. With four books written and a fifth started, I am now preparing the illustrations and maps for the next book in the series – but in the meantime, I hope you enjoy The Hidden Destiny.

You will find at the back of the book the histories and other narratives that inform the main story. These are taken from journals that I’ve been keeping since the earliest days of this work. Highlights from 45 years of additional materials.
I now live in Norwich with Clare and our house sits close to Mousehold heath, so we are close to forests and heathland. My daughter, Araminta is just two doors down from us. She and her husband have a son, little Rex, who often pops in to spend time with “Ba’ba”. We are like two children on an adventure, out in the garden hunting snails or seeking orb spiders in the underworld as they build their webs beneath the trees.

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