I haven't always been an Af-x Practitioner.

"Well, that's true enough in its current form, but I have always been engrossed in activities and practices related to the human subconscious (meditation teaching, Naikan, Ampuku Shiatsu, etc) before the genesis of affectology and Af-x 30 years ago.

One can be engrossed in many different things at the same time, though. I had started another stream of "engrossment" in the 70s, making high quality hand-made leather bags. I later did an apprenticeship in Milan and Florence, in design and production making of leather bags, accessories and cases.

Although this was good stuff, I held firm to my own perception of the value of hand-sewing leather objects, when the rest of the world thought I was nuts. "Well, isn't a machine better?" The answer of course, is "Depends how good the hand-stitching is, because there's no doubt that hand-sewing will last a Hell of a lot longer." There are technical issues about the actual form and structure of each stitch that supports this, but we won't go into that here.

I held the position as Master Craftsman at the Jam Factory Design Centre in Adelaide in the leather training workshop and this lasted a little over 10 years. During that time, I started working on conceptual pieces of my own as well as running a commercially viable training workshop in leather goods. My workshop, and the strong training discipline it embodied produced a slew of successful leather makers that still exist today. After a few years making 'art' in leather and other materials, I started getting commissions and many of my pieces were being bought by collectors and museums both here in Australia and other parts of the globe.

I left the Jam Factory to pursue a little jewellery design work and undertook a course in CADCAM computer design. Some time around the end of that computer course, I was 'head-hunted' for the position of Senior Lecturer in the Leather and Mixed Media Department at the Canberra School of Art, where I taught and made small-scale sculptural work for almost 5 years. I left the CSA after it had been subsumed into the Australian National University (ANU) and pursued my real love - making people feel better through  affect-based psychotherapy, reveling in the early days of building, developing and maintaining my own form of psychotherapy.

People ask me "don't you miss it?" The answer is, "sometimes, but essentially no, because this Af-x work I do is my opus magnum, equally as creative as anything I've done in the past."

Anyway, I just felt like revisiting those days and plonking a few pics on this site.

NOTE: almost all pictures are 'clickable' to enlarge them or show better detail.

Here we go ...

What a difference ... a life makes!"