Other educational contexts suited me better: I presented craft programs on TV, a children's radio program on the NZBC, workshops at the 'Y', and craft courses in conjunction with further education programs.

Returning from Japan with lots to share I had begun teaching again. This time, however, the subjects were those dearest to my heart, and my students were as enthusiastic as their teacher. My interest in education was deepening, especially in the areas of visual language and creativity:
What is the nature of the creative mind? Can it be cultivated? What conditions foster it? What stifles it? What is the relationship between creative thinking, learning, and human consciousness?

Questions like these took me to an international school in England where I found an educational approach that didn't clash with my instincts. At Brockwood Park I worked with students from all over the world in an extraordinary atmosphere of open inquiry.

Brockwood Park School was founded by the philosopher J Krishnamurti. His ideas about education were decades before their time, and are only now filtering through into mainstream educational systems. The aim at the schools he founded was to create an atmosphere where the students' natural interests and creative abilities could flower – without sacrificing academic excellence. Krishnamurti had passed on by the time I arrived at the school, but I was privileged to meet another great creative thinker there – David Bohm, famous for his work in classical and quantum physics. It was David who really clarified my understanding about the nature of creativity, and who inspired me to pursue my passionate interest in the subject.

As an art teacher at these schools I was less concerned with coaching students to produce a certain kind of art product or pass exams (although their results were excellent), than to inquire with them into the creative process. The students playfully referred to the art barn as the de-conditioning chamber!

The school in England was linked with schools in America and India, and my work took me to most of them. It was a decade of travel and teaching, with no studio base. I carried little, and found that deprivation of normal studio conditions seeded many questions:
What if I only worked with materials picked up or given?
What if such limitations were really potent ways of going beyond one's comfortable and habitual ways of working?

Genuine creativity seemed to be dependent on the absence of predictive plans, but what might happen if one's usual materials and tools were also absent?

During this time my visual notebook evolved into what I came to call my 'X-File'. (Think x-periment, x-plore, x-press, x-tend, x-cavate...) It was sketchbook and journal and diary and scrapbook all bound up between one set of covers, and it was a vital companion, ensuring ideas were archived for later when I'd have access to a studio again.

While I was accepting commissions during this time, I wasn't concerned with exhibiting. I was simply 'following fancy'. But as I became more and more committed to exploring and expressing genuine creativity, fancy took on a wholly impersonal nature.

It was clear to me that any of the work 'I' made that felt truly authentic had somehow flowered out of my absence.