I am pleased to be involved in this year’s exhibition Re-View in Newcastle, Hunter Valley Australia, in which artists of a range of media are invited to choose a book or poem that is being featured in Newcastle Writers Festival and to create a piece of work that is inspired by the writing. I chose 'Always Home, Always Homesick' by Hannah Kent. Hannah Kent’s biography relates to her stay at the age of 18 as an exchange student from Australia, in Iceland. Here she fell in love with the landscape, the customs, the language, the people and in her own words “I feel a visceral attachment to this place. My bones have been knitted with this place.” She especially felt drawn in an almost psychic way to the story of Agnes Magnusdottir, the last person to be executed in Iceland and which inspired her novel 'Burial Rites'. Her book is about spirituality, deep connection to place as well as not accepting given stories, but digging deeper to allow your heart to open and be true to yourself. I was drawn to the title of the book as I am recently spending a year in Australia, with a view to emigrating here. Whereas Hannah Kent first lived in Iceland was at the age of 18 with her life ahead of her I am starting a new life in a new country at the age of 72 but despite this I could really relate to her struggles and joys in a strange country and trying to find her place there. There are times when I feel 'euphoric sublimation to beauty' and that particularly in a special place on the ancient rocks and ocean of the Gadigal country. Here my body feels as if I am no longer separate from the land, from the ocean or from its history but that I am a very tiny, but integral part of the past, present and future of the earth that we inhabit, seeing through what is in front of me, revealing layers of time.