Unfolding

on folds, creases, pleats and the endlessness of becoming

JDHoo in The Vegan Magazine, 1996

I first stumbled upon the philosophical concept of the Fold (capital F) from the French Filosopher Gilles Deleuze - who also gave me the word / experience ‘chaosmos’ (which is the point before any creative coalescence). I came across his thinking around the Fold during my early days of making Artistbooks, which I loved to make because of the various ways I might fold paper to disrupt the intellectual and embed the physical reading experience. One way Deleuze describes the Fold as working is as ‘flowing sand might dissolve into grains, but resembles a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending movements, each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surroundings.’ // ‘… divided to infinity in smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion.’

Everything is connected. Everything is in a state of becoming.

It was my immersion into Deleuze’s thinking that became a gateway in a Buddhist practice, which helps me apply his complex concepts on a more lived level.

Steve Lewis’s comment on my last post about confusing my being a writer with being a successful writer reminded me of the helpfulness of nondiscriminative thinking. Nondiscimination is about acceptance, is about noticing the emotional response to anything and attempting to uncouple that from the experience, is trying not to judge or compare. ‘May I be free from attachment and aversion, but not be indifferent’. This last line of a Mette meditation has kept me on my toes for a fair old while. How is this possible?

You may have your own ideas (if you’re even interested). My best answer is (currently) : curiosity. Curiosity offers a state of mind that is open, my best bet at not ascribing ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ to an event. Rather it encourages me to wonder, How is this? How am I in relation to this? And to best be able to ask these questions is to unhook myself from the desired outcome. Yes, I have a trajectory within which I operate - I want to ‘be a writer’ - it just isn’t necesarily how I originally envisioned it. The world is so much bigger than my imagination. Especially my 16 year old imagination.

Remembering all this, I tracked back my various ‘failures’ - those events that didn’t align themselves to my desire - and considered how they altered the course I thought I was travelling. For example: When my A levels didn’t match expectations - of teachers and my university applications - I went to study English Literature rather than Psychology (now, I canot believe I even was thinking to study a science). Not getting a ‘proper’ job after my degree meant I worked at casual placements, met a New Zealander went travelling, learnt to sail. An early conversation with an editor at Faber not developing into a contract left me free to write for a performance trio, collaborating and being funded to workshop and tour together. Penned in the Margins not taking a manuscript of new work led me to making an artistbook to get some of these new poems into the world and discovering the wonder of this form. And on.

So, if I am to think in terms of failure, I might add She who fails also succeeds.

Samuel Beckett’s maxim Fail. Fail again. Fail Better. haunted me for years. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. While I still wouldn’t like to have to explain it to anyone in words I have more of a sense of its meaning. Possibly.

When I wrote those last couple of substack posts I was on an End of Life Doula Foundation course. We were encouraged to consider ourselves as our ‘first client’, and this led me to open myself to the various losses I’d experienced - starting with my mother and then unravelling through other various anchor points I’d be holding on to. Anchor points that are helpful until they’re not. Maybe instead of ‘anchor points’ I might see these points of aspiration [‘goals’ in coaching language] as ‘waymarkers’. I might stop at them for a while, weigh anchor for a night, week or month, or might simply be using them a directional guidance in a larger voyage.

And the longer I am on this voyage, the more clearly I can see the route I’m taking / have taken. I can feel myself embracing fully the sailing metaphor - the tacking (zig-zagging) into a headwind - the tides and currents. And of course I cannot proceed without incorporating the variables of the world I’m in - the ‘consistant or conspiring environment’. And not knowing those variables ahead of time, or the lay of the land you’re heading towards, is challenging, at times disorientating, scary and exhausting. My mantra on the boat was never to sail without someone stronger than me on board. Physical strength is the key for the creative voyage, but certainly I value the presence of others alongside.

So it was interesting to stumble upon this old JD Hoo cartoon from The Vegan. I can’t quite remember how long she appeared there - quarterly for perhaps five or so years. What I do remember is a new editor (replacing Richard Farhall who had originally commissioned them) writing to me (sometime in the late 90s) saying ‘I think these are meant to be funny, but I don’t find them so’. And that was the end of JDHoo’s relationship with The Vegan magazine. And JDHoo in the public realm.

Until I work with Closing Loops on Mapping Our Place, a community participatory project I’ve been trying to get off the ground (seeded in the Walk with Us, NOC collaboration with Maya Chowdhry) for some years, and am now in the final stages of. And see how her spirit is still very much alive in my interpretations of people’s stories on the maps.

Detail from Mapping Our Place, the Marsh and Freeman’s Wood, 2025.

I challenge you to spot which of these images is mine / hers :)

And so back to Deleuze’s ‘certain cohesion’ that rises from the small folds of any one body - whoever’s body we might be considering - human, city, river, planetary. There she is, a crease in my creative yield, who I’d dismissed as being scrappy and ultimately unfunny - no wonder nobody wanted her - until she finds her place in the zine world of community mapping.

Her story here, if you’re curious, is: ‘I can go from a built up housing estate to the middle of nowhere, a sanctuary. It’s an escape.’