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This sketch is from a series of pieces I made about diagrams and reading. It's around 31 x 57cm, made using a mapping pen and goose quill. During my 12keys project of 2005, I became interested in different grammars of drawing, in how - if the weighting is wrong - the object of a labeled diagram can seem to be sprouting antennæ and feelers. How swashes and flourishes need to be 'read through' to make sense of a letter.

The Labyrinth

I made this in 2006, whilst investigating the structure of the inner ear and the path which songs travel in
my head. It's made using acrylic, pastel, graphite and gold ink, on a piece of laid Dorset paper about 33 x 57cm. The ear is cribbed from Grey's Anatomy.

full stop.

This little strange piece I made for the MORTAL show but decided against exhibiting. It would have been eclipsed by 'the a game', sending out an even more confused message than that deliberately polyphonic, encyclopædic folly does on its own. The fragment of bone is from my mother's medical school skeleton. I don't know if it is still the case, but when my parents were at medical school in London each student had two skeletons; their own and another. All that remains of my mother's is a mess of bones in a white plastic bag, missing most parts but with some curious additions. How does one acquire a spare jaw?

If respect even comes into it, is using a part of some unknown body to make a work of trite art worse than leaving it in a bag? Somehow I couldn't bring myself to set scalpel to that fragment of spongy bone. Somehow I ended up shaping it with my teeth, picking at it with my nails as if it were part of my own body. How small a part of someone is taboo? Some cells are more sacred than others, even now. Eggs and seed. The chest was already broken, using it was a little step.

Temporal Meditation (The Black Queen's Pawn)

This is an initial 'sketch' for the Black Queen, one of the pieces of round two of 'the a game'. It is about 19 x 22 x 26cm and made from 15m of knotted seagrass, stained with indian ink. While making it I had to improvise some thimble-like finger guards from masking tape as the repetition of movements involved in knotting the fibre began to wear away at my skin. The final version will be larger and act as a kind of crystallized performance; I will attempt to knot a longer rope of seagrass fibres in one sitting meditation. Temporal is a weak pun on time and neuroanatomy.

My recent work has been moving towards aspects of process and performance, and not only in durational, endurance activities such as this and my network drawings: I have found that the aspect of exhibiting my work that is most exciting is the opportunity to use the work as a seed and a site for dialogue with the public.

Recursive Colophon

This is the first purely typographic work I have made in several years. All my typecraft owes a lot to the work of pioneering typographers like Wolfgang Weingart and John Maeda. This particular experiment is, as you can probably tell, a joke about fractals executed in thrice-blesséd Hoefler Text. I plan to make a steadily fading version with even more iterations, but fear for the safety of my computer. Still, as my brother continually tells me, art is all about knowing when to stop.

I've just noticed the similarities between this image and the black beams in the post below. Coincidence? Yes.