Proof that the Babel story is alive and well

Once, nearly all of the Western World believed something along these lines: the historical truth of the Babel story, the dispersal of the tribes, and the resultant birth of the modern nations and languages. During the 1600s, scores of books were written claiming that this or that nation was descended from the only righteous tribe. What is now very much a fringe ideology was widespread and taken very seriously, and is just beneath the surface of many contemporary beliefs and attitudes. It is part of the foundations of the binary framework so crucial to the operations of our culture, and is almost always expressed with very rigid black-and-white thinking:

"It is an existence that functions in darkness - not in light, in error - not in truth, in unrighteousness - not in righteousness, and in godlessness - not in godliness. The end result of this delusion is the absolute damnation and eternal ruin of its practitioner..." [taken from a post aptly called Babelology]

There is a raw persuasive power to this kind of logic. It's like the crocodile, unchanged and undiminished for millennia. Living here in the City, I fear and respect it.

The Gatehouse

The Gatehouse is a hybrid image I made in 2006 from a number of digital photographs, combined mainly by abusing the Photoshop healing tool. During my late teens most of my work was made in this way, using Photoshop to combine scans, sketches and photographs to create this kind of lyrical gothica. The Gatehouse was the first such image I had made for a couple of years, and I was pleased to find that working with 'real' media (drawing and painting) had improved my Photoshop skills. Mammon and my Collapsed Notebooks notwithstanding, I have yet to return to digital imagemaking. During the next round of The A Game, my current project, there will be ample opportunity to rediscover what is possible; the progress I have made over the last few years with my penmanship will, I think, stand me in good stead when I come to experiment with web-based work. The most challenging part of this next phase will be learning about vector graphics, a whole new breed of digital techniques far removed from playing with pixels.

The Fall of Language

This is an ink and graphite drawing on reclaimed sunbleached card. The composition was influenced, Surrealist-style, by the characteristics of the surface. Hidden within the inked swirls are the letters of the Alphabet and the Arabic numerals. The pale tower has onehundred and fourtyfour layers of assymetric bricks, hand-drawn with technical pencil.