When I first started documenting foxgloves, something unexpected happened. I placed the stem on the scanner and what appeared on the screen wasn’t a foxglove. It was a human spine. A vertebral column. An exposure of something we don’t usually see, like a CT scan revealing what lies below the surface.
The foxglove stopped being a plant. It became the structure of our internal being.
When I draw on the foxglove, I’m hanging my drawing on a skeleton. On the vertebrae of real human experience.
This week I’ve been drawing hearts. Anatomically correct ones at first, then something looser happened, the way drawing always does when you stop trying to control it. I’m working in Procreate, using brushes I built about a year ago to draw feathers. Feathers need a particular kind of line: flowing, gestural, with enough stability to hold the movement of the hand. I made the brushes from photographs. They remember where they came from.
Those same brushes are now drawing cardiac muscle. The Purkinje fibres, which are the electrical conducting system of the heart. The chordae tendineae, which are the heartstrings, tiny tendinous cords that hold the heart valves in place and stop them going too far in the wrong direction. Doorkeepers. Holders of elastic boundaries.
The gesture of my hand moving through muscle fibre is making marks that mimic the fibres themselves. I don’t think that’s an accident. I think that’s what drawing does when you let it.
And then the foxglove structures start appearing in the drawing. Growing from the heart. Because of course they do. Foxgloves produce digoxin, which is a cardiac medication that slows the heart rate. As a student nurse, I handed it out on the ward. I did ECGs on patients in the coronary care unit in Glasgow at two in the morning, making paper recordings of the heart’s electrical activity. I learned to read the rhythms: sinus rhythm, ventricular tachycardia, the dangerous ones and the safe ones.
I didn’t plan any of that when I started documenting foxgloves. The connection arrived on its own. The plant that regulates the heartbeat became the substrate of the heart drawing.
It’s easy to intellectualise our existence. To think that poetry and love and romanticism are luxuries. But I think the human body is physical evidence that love is real. Our hearts were growing and developing and functioning before words ever existed, before a single poem was written. The poetry came from the physicality. Humans looked at the body and tried to understand it, and what they found was that the heart conducts electricity, that the heartstrings hold elastic boundaries, that the strength of it comes from its ability to stretch and close and stretch again.
The romance of it all was always real. It was just waiting to be described.
I’ve been thinking about how meaning arrives in practice rather than being placed there. A recent lecture by Professor Rebecca Fortnum gave me language for something I’d felt but not quite named.
Fortnum opened by describing correspondence as a research method. She said: “Correspondence is an active form of research situated in an address that seeks response. The correspond suggests a meeting, a point of confluence, maybe based on likeness or commonality as much as difference.” She talked about how it is marked by its direct, intimate appeal, and how that matters for researchers whose work demands an emotional dimension. Traditional research asks you to be objective, nonpartisan, to keep yourself out of it. Correspondence does the opposite. You are immediately in a relationship with your subject. You are writing to someone.
She talked about Lubaina Himid, who often writes in letters because it is an appropriate form for her ideas to take. When asked to document why she staged her groundbreaking exhibitions, Himid wrote back rather than producing a formal account. The letters started with an inquiry about the person she was writing to. They had the intimacy of saying things that could seem quite polemical, while also carrying the authority of writing that would be published and widely read. Himid had found a mode of telling that chimed with her own experience of feeling outside of history. To write her story in an authoritative academic voice would have been to replicate the very model that had excluded her.
But what landed most for me was what Fortnum said about coincidence.
She described coincidence as something it is hard to be dismissive of in an artistic process. She said: “Quite often, my experience is it comes from a notion of coincidence. An important part of it is that you recognise it. You see it. You note it. And somehow it has significance for you. Which is why you’ve noticed it.” She went on: “Coincidence preserves experiences and knowledges from the ephemerality of time passing, making them by their intersection cohere as events and phenomena of significance.”
The significance, she said, is completely subjective to each person. A coincidence is recognised when a current experience connects to a past one. It is a bridge between past and present. Which is why, she argued, we shouldn’t dismiss them. They are telling us something about the way we are thinking, even when we don’t yet know what.
This hit something in me hard. All my life, synchronicity and coincidence have given me meaning in ways I’ve never quite been able to justify academically. Not the trigger itself, not the explanation for why it happens, but the feeling of it. The deja vu. The chime. My pattern-seeking brain lighting up with recognition.
I remember being at Edinburgh College of Art years ago, me and my twin sister Kirsty, and a lecturer we were close to came running up to us in the Sculpture Court, excited, almost breathless. He knew we were into these kinds of things, the esoteric, the uncanny, the books that sit in the gap between science and mystery. He said: I just had a feeling of deja vu. And Kirsty and I just smiled at each other, and I said, I don’t know what that means, but I know it’s a good sign. It was such a simple exchange. But it was a connection on a deep level, and that’s what I really value about being an artist. It helps me be more human. It’s scratching through the surface of life and finding more meaning underneath.
So to hear a professor of fine art, in an academic context, stand up and say that coincidence is important and should not be dismissed in artistic practice, was genuinely moving to me. It wasn’t just validating. It was clarifying. Like something I’d always half-known being spoken aloud by someone with the authority to say it.
My process is not linear. I don’t begin with a concept and work toward it. I begin with a material, or a plant, or a feeling, or a fragment, and meaning arrives sideways, later, when I’m not looking. The foxglove didn’t announce itself as a spine on day one. The heart didn’t come looking for the plant that regulates it. I was just working and suddenly these things were inside each other, already.
For a long time I assumed this was a gap in my practice, a sign I wasn’t rigorous enough. Fortnum made me think it might be the practice itself.
She also talked about coincidence as doppelganger. The uncanny double. Things that mirror each other across time or discipline without having been introduced. My twin sister Kirsty. The feather brush drawing the fibre. The nurse who did ECGs now drawing the electricity of the heart. I had already submitted an application for a Soane Museum residency and been making drawings from sculptures in the collection when Fortnum showed her own drawings of those same sculptures in the lecture. I sat there thinking, that’s uncanny.
These aren’t metaphors I constructed. They are the actual materials of my life, turning up in the work uninvited.
I don’t think I’m the one finding these connections. I think the connections were already there and I’m the instrument that notices them.
Fortnum also said something that stayed with me about copying. In the art world, copying is denigrated. But she argued the opposite: that it is actually easier to be unique than to make a truly faithful copy. A faithful copy requires a quality of looking that originality doesn’t demand. It asks you to fully inhabit another person’s perception. That idea connects directly to the exercise she set us.
She asked us to write a letter. To someone whose practice matters to us, or written from their perspective back.
I chose Tracey Emin. Not for her fame or her controversy. For her tenacity. For the way she refuses to separate her life from her work, her body from her material. I saw her show A Second Life at the Tate and the sheer volume stopped me. From her early art college paintings to the bronzes to the enormous stitched canvas pieces. Those vast murals made from tiny human stitches, one by one. It’s almost a symbol of her whole career. She stitched it. Slowly, impatiently, doggedly. And it became these vast things. The softness doesn’t take away from the strength. Her vulnerability is testament to the fact that vulnerability is incredibly powerful.
I wrote the letter in her voice, back to myself. I didn’t read it out in the seminar. I wish I had.
Here it is now.
Dear Rachel,
You think I found a way to step over it. That I’d found a way to move it to one side, out of my way. So I could step around it.
But I didn’t.
I let the chaos move through me, back towards me. I held my arms open.
This storm of life, the twister I carried, left its dust on my skin. It settled on me. But instead of washing it off I started to draw in it with my fingers. Like the way you draw on rusty cars. Fingerprints in dried fumes.
I’m a chameleon. I camouflage myself with these pigments and make war paint with them too.
My hands can’t stop painting with them. And then, as I watch paint dry, I show you how to hold a moving storm still.
My bronze, my ink, this paint is squeezed from the rags of life.
Correspondence, Fortnum said, looks backward and forward. Remembrance and prophecy at once.
The foxglove holds the spine. The spine holds the heart. The heart conducts electricity before words exist to describe it. The plant slows the beat so you can hear it.
Write the letter anyway.
R.
Bibliography
Fortnum, R. (2026) Correspondence as Research Methodology. Guest lecture, MA Fine Art Digital, Central Saint Martins, UAL, 30 April 2026.
Fortnum, R. and Sheridan, A. (eds.) (2013) On Not Knowing: How Artists Think. London: Black Dog Publishing.
Emin, T. (2005) Strangeland. London: Sceptre.
Himid, L. (2012) Letters to Susan. [Artist publication.]
Tyson, N. (2015) Dead Lettermen. [Artist book.]
Paul, C. (2019) Letters to Gwen John. London: Jonathan Cape.
Polanyi, M. (1966) The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McGilchrist, I. (2009) The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Withering, W. (1785) An Account of the Foxglove and Some of its Medical Uses. Birmingham: M. Swinney.
That’s the complete final version. Around 1,650 words. Go paste it into Jetpack, date 30 April 2026, save as draft. Then come back and we’ll pull together the Left Luggage post next.