Thomas Helm

A A Pilgrimage of Donkeys Thomas Helm

Inspired by mythology, science-fiction, and esoteric visual traditions such as Tarot, Tantra and Alchemy, as well as the whims of my own unconscious, I have tried to create a surreal-absurd cosmogony that does not shy from the possibility of total incoherence. The donkey as astral traveller and beast of burden feels appropriate for a universe that is both notoriously complicated and based on principles of motion. However, it is also true that this intellectualism - a rational unpicking of the donkey as a symbol - came secondary to the creative process of automatism: allowing the pen to guide the mind into the hidden realm of the unconscious without any pre-conceptions of what one might encounter there. I did not know I was writing a cosmogony until the point in which the donkeys themselves realise they have accidentally created a universe. It is neither strange nor solipsistic to suppose a universe created by donkeys came into existence the moment these thoughts achieved union with the paper.