Artwork and reflections by Tamsin Cunningham
The experience of being in the Tayos Caves was for me one of a profound sense of sanctuary. Although I had spent a great deal of time in remote places and far from human civilization before, the way that Tayos made me feel was unexpected and deeply healing. There was something about that particular sensory landscape; the dark, the separation from the outside world, the warm, womb-like atmosphere of the cave’s expansive caverns, the soft colours and tactility of its rock-faces that made me feel held, protected and soothed.
When the time came for me to emerge from this sense of sanctuary I was troubled. My senses felt as if they had undergone a reset; a re-calibration that heightened the noise and activity and hustle and bustle of life in the city I lived in to acute levels. The freneticism of ‘normal life’ felt unacceptably intense and I quickly found myself obsessing over the idea of this day-to-day life as the inverse of that sense of sanctuary I’d encountered in Tayos.
These drawings date from that time. They are a testament to my preoccupation then with forming boundaries, with trying to piece together the sense of jangled fragmentation I felt, existing in what seemed like a bombardment of traffic noise, the ping of mobiles, emails and notifications of all kinds. I was trying to work out how to build myself a barrier strong enough to mimic the solidity of Tayos’s walls; to create a sanctuary that would hold at bay what seemed to me to be the onslaught of life in a 21st century city.
But as time has passed my hunger for a purity of sanctuary in the spaces around me has softened. I’ve come to realise that the very act of defiantly rejecting all those things that felt like sensory intrusion carried with it a sense of aggression. In order to maintain my strict sense of sanctuary I had had to harden the walls I was building between myself and the world; I’d had to toughen the filters I placed between myself and the cacophony of sensory data that surrounded me. Like a snail in its shell I had put in place measures that protected me from the world but without those measures I felt exposed, thin-skinned, fragile.
One of the defining characteristics of true sanctuary is that it is always there for those that need it. No matter the circumstances, no matter where or who you are. It is not as fragile as a snail shell but it can be carried with you. It is a shelter formed not by walls but by an understanding, a state of mind. And so as time has passed I’ve found that the sanctuary of Tayos is still available to me, when and where I need it as long as I acknowledge that its boundaries lie not between myself and the world around me but within me. And as I hold the idea of sanctuary in my minds eye, in the slowing of my breath and the calming of my heartbeat, those hard barriers I had sought to build between the hustle and my senses seem less crucial. I can linger in the quiet space they create from time to time without clinging to it. I can lean out into the world a little more; savour it and celebrate it. Because sanctuary is always there if it is needed.
