I write to T.  at least once a week and I have been fortunate to receive 52 letters from him since we began writing.  My friend is an incredible human being; despite his suffering in isolation he has more compassion for others than most people

I regularly meet in my ‘free’ world.

 

His family for the most part have abandoned him. T. has a young daughter who he hasn’t seen in years. I cannot even imagine how unbearable this is for him.

 

T. very often asks about Theo, how he spends his time and how he is changing as he grows. My son also knows I write to him and has an abounding sense of compassion and sadness for him. He decided to make him

a paper snowflake for a Christmas present this past year. 

 

Having sent T. pictures of our cat, he told me how some death row inmates keep pets of their own; spiders, flies, cockroaches, to appease the loneliness. Although T. himself doesn’t keep pets, this made me desperately sad. I spend a great deal of time alone myself so we are both isolated to some degree.

 

T. is intelligent; he asks big and deep questions of this world and he tries to find the answers through reading. He has recently been educating himself about world religions to glean a better understanding of spirituality, the nature of existence and politics. 

 

We have never spoken about what he has been convicted of and for me,

it has been and always will be superfluous information.

 

The painting ‘Consensus Ad Idem’ derived from the initial concept that whilst we have no immediate physical presence in one another’s lives, we are connected inextricably through our mental worlds. Through our letters and words we both have come to know one another’s joys, fears, worries, desires and experiences. We are both part of the same physical world and the closeness we feel as friends is a bond of understanding. The painting is also a statement that we are the same and yet different. As human beings we are desperately alone inside our minds and arguably we all spend our lives striving to connect with others; to be understood and to share our experiences with another that cares.