Biography

Nicholas May

Creativity is an a spect of life that I feel is central to a healthy psyche, it directly influences our vitality in lived experience. I have a long history of working in the sphere of creativity. I have worked for most of my adult life as a practising artist, exhibiting internationally, I was also a visiting lecturer in the then Chelsea Art College, London, and many other colleges throughout the UK.

After acquiring an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths in the early 1990’s I practiced as a ‘process-based’ abstract painter in London and I have paintings in several major national and international collections. I am now a Core Process Psychotherapist.

In 2009 I completed an MSc in Art Psychotherapy (with distinction) in Edinburgh. In 2010 I moved to Lewes, East Sussex, where I had my second son. I deepened my internal and interpersonal inquiry further by studying an MA in Core Process Psychotherapy at this time, at The Karuna Institute in Devon, completing my training in 2015, having taken a year out to spend more time with family whilst working at The Brighton Therapy Centre

From 2010 to 2016 I worked as both an Art Psychotherapist and a Core Process Psychotherapist at The Brighton Therapy Centre, whilst living nearby in Lewes, East Sussex. 
I still make art but on a less ambitious scale, I no longer have the desire to engage with a highly competitive art world in London. In 2016 I chose to return to Ireland to address my alienation and loss of sense of belonging. I needed to come to terms with what caused me to turn my back on the culture of my birth. To be with the echo of the trauma and the shame held in that turning away. All the while opening and deepening the process of self enquiry, to become more accepting of my inner world and its relationship to the world out there. This acknowledging of the 'felt sense' of connection in relationship, so much a part of the Core Process approach has been broadened more recently with group work, primarily In the form of men's groups, thus far.