The central arena was a vast circular enclosure with a handful of pathways and bridges leading to smaller areas outside its perimeter. It was sparsely filled with revellers but packed round the edges with shops, stalls and music tents. I felt something very unnerving about the atmosphere. The way in which the very few people moved round the space, clockwise on the outside, like mechanical bees looking for nectar in the colourful shops; it was like an invisible hand was dictating their behaviour. I could feel its pull.

I managed to hold off the mechanical force and headed into the very centre of the field, where some graffiti walls had been set up and the grass still remained green and virginal, after the torrential downpour from the night before. Here, I felt the emptiness of the inner arena, as if it were suddenly put under a microscope and the rest of the festival vanished from my thoughts.

Three artists were working their worlds into tall sections of the outward facing, hexagonal-sided canvas. I floated round absorbing their creations. Invisible landscapes made visible. The first artist was working with a roller; big, blocks of day-glow colours, all strata with straight edges and lines of flight connecting various points.  The second artist had drawn a thin outline of a group of party goers onto a light-green background. The space inside the bodies were slowly becoming collage, as the artist cut and pasted images and text, from newspapers, flyers, magazines and long discarded artworks. He was working on the background characters and filling their eyes with text.

I finally came to rest in the shadow of a canvas being worked by a tall, slender girl. She was dressed in skater’s clothing; baggy blue jeans and a fitted-tee. Her long dark hair was partially braided and her wrists were covered in many different festival bands. She worked at her canvas in startling fits of energy, in between which she stepped back and wondered for a moment, before a new explosion of energy sent her rushing back and dashing her paints across the quickly disappearing white-wash background.

There were thick, black stencil markings underneath her strokes, in what appeared to be the shape of a Celtic pattern. I followed the dashes and shapes around with my eyes, each time being led into an untouched space in the centre of the pattern. In places, the paint was still wet and it gave the impression of standing out from the image. The fresh strokes were combinations of reds, oranges and yellows. Some burst out from the edges whilst others, thinner and more delicate, roughly followed the lines of black. I marvelled at her rhythmic expansion and contraction, with which she held sway over the world, her creation of symbols and form.

With my eyes piercing the surface of the image, I found myself coming in and out of the layers and I slowly began to be wrapped in her picture. Then, temporarily besotted with the action of creation - her arm, her hand, the wand it held – I was simply lost in the act of creation; swimming along the strokes as they were painted. Then as her energy burst subsided, she’d move back, joining me in being apart from that flaming celtic flower.

I had to rescue my gaze from the canvas in order to make out the fullness of the flower; it wasn’t that it was blurred but rather I was struggling to see its different dimensions. Then she rushed back. The tendril spreading flower slipped deeper and deeper into the scope of my gaze until it was simply no longer a flower; but purely an intricate pattern of symbols. Symbols I couldn’t decipher on their own; only as a masquerading whole.