October 1998
Katy Maguire was perfect except for the back legs which scraped the ground going down hill. It was a kind of loss of faith. She feared that her legs would give out. She refused to trust the rhythmic movements passed down in her genes. Fear and stubbornness ruled. It was a fear fed by a rampant imagination. A swooping bird, a rustle of leaves, a passing shadow, everything reduced her to a trembling nervous excitement. “Shy” was the word we used: she would ”shy” from anything that moved. I grew up with her and I grew up like her.

After she died I started to imagine her journey through horse history. This was the starting point. Katy provoked the memories and the connections to make these drawings. However, once started her presence is submerged in the process: a backdrop to the making and unmaking of the images.

Now the ideas come and go quickly, carrying the same weight as a twitch or a scratch. Thought becomes physical movement, like an athlete. It is this submersion in the process of making that I trust: where I am most myself; most free. It is a place where the conscious mind is made fluid and where, as John Keats said, we “trust in the integrity of the senses and the truth of the imagination.” Here, fully charged, and grounded in the physical materials of drawing, I thrash around looking for that moment when an unexpected clarity shows itself and the hair on the back of my neck starts to rise. It is a moment when evidence of Katy comes back at me out of the drawing transformed from memory, into the unforeseen marks, into “Hero Horse, ”into “ Traveler.”