User:Nicola Eyre

Jon Goffey - (Born c 1930's - 2000? probable suicide) - British performance artist and the United Kingdom's first native American nature writer.

Biography

Jon Goffey was born in the late 1930's into abject rural poverty in the village of Wraxell in Somerset. He became a soldier in the British army but was discharged in the 1960's suffering either PTSD, undiagnosed bi-polar and erratic violence directed at superior officers.

After discharge Goffey drifted into a variety anarchist groups (unconfirmed member of the Angry Brigade) underground communes, became homeless, turned to petty crime. Aged forty he turned his back on society undertaking the first of multiple pilgrimages into nature. Quoting Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Goffey suggests he was searching for a personal 'sabbath of meek content'. He goes on to describe how in these places, perhaps in a shamanistic trance state, he began, ‘looking into my abyss', 'my half-light flights of the mind’ or ‘suffering dreamscape hallucinations’ and ‘nocturnal visions’. However, it could well be that far from real induced shamanistic practise, these visions were in fact bought about because of his withdrawal from hard drugs, further bouts of mental illness, or as he writes the 'trickster whispering of my ancestral voices'.

It is probable that Jon Goffey’s maternal lines  stems from the illegitimate contact between two cultures, via one of the thousands of native people brought to these shores since 1577 and kept as ‘living exhibits’ and ‘language decodifies’ in a variety of upper class houses. His genealogy may descend from either a man named Nanawak (Powhaton) who stayed at Wherwell Priory Manor House in Hampshire in 1610. More probably he descends from one of the three Algonquin men, Manedo, Sketwarroes, and Saffacomoit, presented to the wealthy coloniser Sir Ferdinando Gorges by English merchant adventurer George Weymouth in Wraxell, Somerset in 1605.

It was a combination of Goffey's pilgrimages and the uncovering of this specific aspect of his history, 'the idea of human removal, erasure from location and landscape' and a human being as ‘living exhibit for profit’ which triggered his life's work. In one particularly intense 'cave dwelling pain shock', he began to see himself, ‘at the edge of the world without a centre. Maybe now I can begin again. Differently. Transformed’ and it was the shape and texture of this transformation that fed directly into his later poetry, writing, art, performance and the many installations and landscape interactions. All of it prefigured what have now become the normative tropes within this creative sphere.

Early Work

Criminal Activity

References