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A Flurry of Urgency (2019) 

6 x 16inch x 20inch photographic enlargements (35mm B+W Film), Ink on tracing paper 

Rolling rhythms, the earth 

bright white the sky, carve the simplest life from an outline, 

splintered eye of the sun

shower streets, golden, they race - 

barefoot in grass and cobblestone, 

a flurry of urgency. 

A kind world, turning men into boys 

we’ve heard all about 

the good life 

The wasting of time is currents of stabbing to the gut

is black ocean, no small thing 

as background to the hum of the traffic - 

the united hysteria of a house on fire. 

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Maintenance Man

My first attempt at a performance/film contemplating useful work and authority figures. 

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Experimentation with editing images as poems. 

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Poems in progress, Oct. 2018

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Series of screen prints and poems considering the character ‘Vladimir’, Oct. 2018

vlad (1)

 vlad said his purpose revolved around the crack rock

he will beg to be wanted,

to be enough,

to be as the stars,

on their lunch breaks

enjoying a smoke.

he said he’d pay off his friends once he was satisfied

(he said) he’d pray to be somebody once he finished wallowing in the cage of his love

he said he’d stitch up his scars, redden his translucent cheeks,

pay off his personal puppet once his shivers subsided

once his cock worked again

once the summer ended

once he felt seasonally cold

once he was whole

 once, he wept for a half gram

and tore the foil off his arms

emptying his purpose into the gutter.

another time, he was awake so long he was an object among the living

he was a (hero) – a mad artist with his hands.

 streets sieve out the fat rats,

the boiler makers, and the hand-held

but the conscious are still asking ‘why’ for some reason.

  stranger, fable

stranger,

you stifle every word I write

you star in every dream

and still, you won’t claw your way back from that hospital bed

 suck up every last drop

you’ll forget every cell of yourself

bend until you crack –

stranger.

 don’t get old and cheap and trite

don’t send one word home

find a tear in the screen and run

 you know what they say when an addict dies?

he’s pinned to the crucifix

the summer melting the blue out of the sky

memory fading like tainted thoughts of love

his soul will burst from that shit hole of a home

he’s occupied and

use

and use

and use

 stranger, blackbird

caged in my oven,

I see you wallow in a hollow fate

so again, let us empty our tips

into bottles.  

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Photographic tryptic, Oct. 2018

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If a June night could talk 

Context Collaborative, open call 

18/09/18 Hyde Park Book Club 

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“There are hidden characters in every poem to ensure they’re not all about me”. - Vahni Capildeo 

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I Miss Hanging Out With You 2018

Inspired by the Jenny Holzer’s use of language in public exhibition, this image considers the medium of graffiti as a platform for anonymous ideas to be shared in an urban setting. 

(featured in Rally Cap zine.) 

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NO NAME BOYS, 2 x A2 altered photographic prints 

Lisbon, Portugal’s abundance of graffiti offered inspiration for these images and for many of the images shown in Rally Cap. This tag offers a simple umbrella heading for many of the photographs I have made over the last two years, labelling the subjects of my images as faceless, universal depictions of humanity. 

Man Ray’s abstraction of real world images in his surrealist photographic and collage works was highly influential in the production of these works. Considering the visual reconstruction of the world in this way by playing with elements of a scene and removing it from it’s original context is interesting to me, as the subjects presented become universal symbols of experience - suggesting the anonymity of people as well as the universal nature of human life. 

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Protect our Future, 2 x A2 altered photographic prints 

Following feedback from my mid year review I planned to make my photographs with more purpose and intention in terms of subject matter, composition and thematic concerns. Once I began to be able to walk again after my ankle surgery, I began considering photographs as two new things: poetic elements and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s concept of ‘living newspapers’. Photographed at London’s March for our lives event outside the US embassy, these prints decontextualise the problem of gun control, depicting it’s statements of protest as modern mottos for American culture. The image of the young girl amongst the crowd aims to unify the tragic experiences of all citizens who have suffered from violent crime - a symbol of hope and resilience in a time when corruption is so often at the forefront. 

One of my key influences in considering these photographs was Gillian Wearing’s Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992-93). In her portraits, she makes the thoughts of the subject the primary focus. I aimed to do something similar here, using the statements shown on the protest posters as the thoughts of the girl in the first image, and then the thoughts surrounding the American flag - the thoughts of a nation - in the second. 

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“Some really hard hitting, political points. Really liked the "protect our future" picture with the innocence of the girl at the centre.” - unknown

"The poetry readings were made all the more powerful by the vastness of the space. Hearing a single voice speak above the crowd from the pulpit emphasised each word and created a sense of performance" - Erica Mcgovern

"Is it supposed to feel a little bit blasphemous?" - unknown

“I almost feel like I know the people in the pictures.” - Robert Day 

“The live readings were really compelling, bringing everyone together around the pulpit to listen to the poems un-amplified  was powerful, although hard to hear at times.” - Felicity Burton 

I felt an interesting tension between the space and my work in this setting. The rough, grainy qualities of my photographs and almost childlike construction of Suits (the painted work on show), along with the hanging of images reminiscent to posters spurred a feeling that I was defacing the glory of the space.

I think that the pillar was a successful curatorial opportunity. It allowed viewers to walk around the work, seeing each piece individually, but as part of the sequence. This mirrored the sequence of images in the zine shown alongside the prints and highlighted the narrative qualities of my work.

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Instillation/exhibition photos, Where these spaces reach and bodies align. 

Works shown: 

- Suits, 2017-18, Oil, ink and graphite on canvas and wood

- Rhythms, 2 x A2 photographic prints 

- Protect our Future, 2 x A2 photographic prints 

- NO NAME BOYS, 2 x A2 photographic prints 

- Selected photographs, 2017-18

- Rally Cap, zine 

- Selected poems, 2017-18, performance/reading alongside Context Collaborative 

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The finished version of Rally Cap, a zine looking at the universal experiences of human existence, a celebration of no name characters and the everyday as experienced by everyone. I take on an almost journalistic attitude here.  Incorporating illustration and poetry, the work brings together the different elements of my practice, creating a living narrative - an abstract representation of the world in which names, dates, locations and circumstances can be removed from context and made irrelevant. When the characters presented are faceless and nameless, the viewer/reader becomes each one, thus making the work simultaneously a reflection of myself and of each viewer. 

The format is important. Inspired by the Café Royal Books series, the zine format maintains an honest, DIY aesthetic representation in an era when most people consume photographs on platforms like Instagram. It aims to be a  physical, sequential collection of works, offering points of nostalgia, calm, angst and relatability in a form that provides direct insight into how it was made and by who. 

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Lisbon, Portugal, Easter

Starting with the pair of images No Name Boys that I plan to print text and small drawings over in the darkroom, using printed acetate negatives. Additionally, I experimented with burning film negatives here. A couple of the images in this series were set alight to a controlled degree, burning out elements of the negative, allowing for handwritten text to take it’s place in print. In these instances, I aim for the image and the text to suffer equally - the image being partially destroyed and the text remaining somewhat illegible due to scribbly handwriting, cut-offs in the scanner etc. 

I also experimented with setting fire to a couple of negatives in this selection, removing or erasing parts of the images, resulting in further tampering with the images, abstracting the already decontextualised scenes.

Mikael Siirilä’s photography resonates with my work here. He describes his process as seeking “contemplative, calming and quietly beautiful images” as well as the “language of composition”, but it is the simple, focused clarity of his photographs that seem reminiscent of poetic or literary images, which makes his reference to compositional language all the more interesting. I consider my photographs in a similar way - as having a similar aim - as they attempt to visually comprise images created through language in my poems. The subjects are often turned away from the camera, their faces sometimes severed in composition and their presence sometimes only represented by inanimate forms, thus allowing them to represent poetic, lingual images in visual abstractions of the banal and the everyday. 

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Initial, very rough plan for how we might curate Where these spaces reach and bodies align. Considering the sheer size of Left Bank and the abundance of sculptural works we plan to show, my photographic works will need to be mounted to the moveable walls available at the venue, or to the pillars. I think that showing my prints on a pillar could be very interesting, perhaps resembling posters that have been fly posted.