Artist Statement
These are the highlights that changed me forever. Each created, generated and steered by 12-Words and 8-Stations.
2017. I excavate my underworld, teenage nightclub. It re-awakened my non-institutional voice.
2024. I descend Bette Davis stairs in a bespoke denim ballgown. To make myself the mistress of my own plantation.
2025. I hold an exorcism in a forest of 8-station mind-maps. Where the ghosts show me how focusing on my race is hiding what is really wrong with me.
HOME. MMIW. Time-lapse by @S.b.hughes
12-Words 8-Stations my current project
To find out what is really wrong with me, I am writing chapters of 12-Words, 8-Stations on my Monday newsletter https://www.lindabrogan59.com/. Immerse yourself in the journey for free. I think it will particularly suit people who:
Don’t know who they are as an artist anymore?
- Don't know who you are as an artists anymore?
- Never knew who you were?
- Institutional overwhelm?
- Social media fatigue?
- Your followers are a millstone.
- You need to burn the plantation down.
- Commune with you ghosts to find out what the fuck is really wrong with you.
- And like all great fables the ghosts will bestow a sword if you crack their riddle.
12-Words is the boat. 8-Stations are locations of your subconscious. Their 8 symbols: your compass. Used like the Vikings navigated the celestial cues. In free weekly writing and creative exercises.
12-Words, 8-Stations
Using 12-words and 8-stations, commune with your hidden ghosts, lay them to rest, resurrect your creativity.
The "12-words and 8-stations" method is a creative and therapeutic practice developed by artist and playwright Linda Brogan and psychology professor Adam Danquah. It is designed to explore memory, identity, and personal histories by helping individuals "exorcise" or address difficult past experiences and, in doing so, unlock their creativity.
The Method
The process acts as a bridge between storytelling, therapy, and creative expression. The user starts by identifying twelve words that relate to a specific memory or issue, which act as prompts to uncover "hidden layers of experience". That are then explored through a series of eight "stations, to unfold their deeper meaning and emotional significance.
Core Philosophy
The method is rooted in the idea that unresolved emotional pain and unaddressed personal histories (referred to metaphorically as "hidden ghosts") can block creativity and personal growth. By providing a structured, yet imaginative, framework to confront these 'ghosts,' the individual can:
• Commune with their past: Acknowledge and process difficult memories and emotions in a safe, structured environment.
• Lay them to rest: Achieve a sense of peace or resolution with these experiences through creative expression and self-reflection.
• Resurrect creativity: Free up the emotional energy previously consumed by these unresolved issues, allowing for renewed inspiration and creative flow.
Example of Use
One participant in a workshop during My MUM IS WHITE: Exorcising Half-Caste Ghosts at HOME Art Gallery Manchester led by Brogan and Danquah described how a simple phrase, "What does a mixed-race sink look like?" became a "magic diagram" that filled her with "inspiration and a quiet sense of peace" after using the method. The structure of the method allowed her to transform a potentially fraught memory into a rhythmic and complex piece of self-understanding and art.
The method is a powerful tool that uses the act of creation and personal narrative to facilitate psychological healing and artistic expression.
HOME Art Gallery MY MUM IS WHITE: Exorcising Half-Caste Ghosts.
The therapy was first used to address the challenge Linda Brogan and Adam Danquah faced being born mixed-race. ‘Half-caste’ feelings, dissociated through inter-personal, inter-political and inter-racial trauma, under the regime of a societal caste system.
In Linda’s Words
Caste is a 3000-year-old system. Brahmins superior. Dalits inferior. Jim Crow adopts it. Public white sinks are generous. Black sinks barely hold to the wall. What does a mixed-race sink look like? Using memoirs, mind-maps, visitor input, an exorcism, I hope to unearth where we — 8 mixed-race creative and cultural practitioners (C&C) — belong.
As a pale skin safe black, Adam is invited into a prestigious psychology practise. His colleagues take historic offence to his kinky hair curl in the bathroom sink. He is driven out. Their caste privilege — or Adam’s internalised caste shame?
I struggle. My dad is yam. My mum is cabbage & ribs. My dad, third world. My mum, western. My dad fears money. My mum calls him mean. When the world becomes woke and black lives matter, my white mum is no longer supposed to matter to me.
We'll open these multilayered conversations with 6 other mixed-race C&C practitioners. Who may find they are not black enough. But are never white in any circumstance. A gallery makes it a public conversation.
Aims
I am born 1959. Pre-Civil Rights. In a world that has a nice sink for white people and a shit sink for black people. Deliberate caste inducing symbols.
Suppose I’m 4. I’m walking down the street with my mum. I need water. Does my mum lift me to her sink? Or lift me to the coloured sink? Both actions judged by caste.
Embodied when I am 4. My mum is standing in the prenatal queue, stockings by her ankles, for her internal. I am ashamed that my mum is having yet another brown baby.
I want to examine caste: implications, internalised manifestations, ghosts, accumulating in our body, writing trauma on our DNA. With 7 C&C, all mixed-race, all with career skills that will inform our enquiry, open doors to disseminate what we find, and give us institutional power to replicate a methodology that other mixed-race can use to ask, ‘What does a mixed-race sink look like?’
12-Words
• Each C&C has an individual psychology session with me and Adam.
• I ask each mixed-race C&C ‘What does a mixed-race sink look like?’
• What object do you see when I ask the question?
• List 12 things you associate with your object.
• You have 15 minutes to write.
• You must use their object.
• You must use all 12 associations.
• Under your title: What does a mixed-race sink look like?
8-stations
I use their writing to draw the individual’s 8’ x 8’ 8-station mind-map. Developed over 25 years. Used to generate 12 major art projects. Derived from mind-mapping. Each mind-map evolves from 8 stations. With values like tarot cards.
1. Fallen angel = protagonists.
2. Shading = canvas wash.
3. Mask = hidden.
4. Recurring like the moon’s cycle.
5. Change is forced.
6. Creating a world supporting climate.
7. Ghosts emerge.
8. The action, hammered, forges a sword.
Example. Columbus discovers America. Station 1: a galleon. Station 2: 1492. Station 3: First Nation teepees. 5 more. Draw these, in the order they come to you, at each station. You are inhabiting your subconscious. It evolves complex worlds. You can analyse with your conscious mind.
A Forest
Each individual’s 8’x 8’ 8-station mind-map is hung to create a forest.
Navigating the Forest
Me and Adam facilitate the C&C group to unpack an individual’s 8’ x 8’ station mind-map per day. Each day I generate their 2nd 8’ x 8’ 8-station mind-map. Their 2nd is hung back-to-back with their first.
Transformation
• Day 28. Midnight. Exorcism.
• Day 29. Dawn. Transform the forest.
• Day 29. Dappled sunlight. Picnic.
Communing with our ghosts I discover that focusing on caste is hiding our real traumas. First mentioned in our planning day, 2 months before, when each of us say a real trauma, but none of us even say, “Oh My God.’
MY MUM IS WHITE allows our ghosts to talk to us. Feel their pain. Give them a decent funeral. With pillar candles and flowers and the empathy of those at the graveside beside us.
Caste is a 3000-year-old system. Brahmins superior. Dalits inferior. They are both Indians. They are the same colour. Jim Crow adopts it. Public white sinks are generous. Black sinks barely hold to the wall. It is about resources. It is not real.
I am using my book to exorcise the ghosts it smothered. But I am no longer afraid of the graveyard. There is so much history etched in the headstones that makes sense of me.