There is an irrefutable compulsion with collectors of detritus, to invent stories about their discoveries, to elevate them to another plateau of an almost unbelievable mystique. Collectors share an obsession with foraging; the thrill being in the chance occurrence of stumbling across something remarkable that nobody else has spotted.  Mixing these components together, creates a unique environment for fabrication, revealing the manifold narratives hidden within the object. Magic symbols, insignia, messages for humanity on the absolute back wall of the retold story. All these things ferment in the reeling mind of the collector. After all, it’s the story that eventually sells the item.

After an imaginary decline, what remains of art and culture: a  curious collection of  hybrid machines that don’t really do anything, the remnants of a defunct, throw-away, plastic culture, left to pile up on the blackened shore, receptacles for the souls of the drowned, the spoiled viands of a culture gone cannibal.  And what of the destroyed technology hurled in a fit of fury into the spiralling waters? All those photographic portraits imprisoned behind the black screen; now the ghosts of a pointillist yesteryear, rubbed, stained and scraped, occupied by incoming effigies, the vengeful aquatic gods of tomorrow, whose mutterings fuse with the pouting speech of pike. Here are the ingredients of an inedible recipe: artifacts and objects transformed by elemental acts of disfiguration, yet to be retrieved from the tide. This is an art form that does not live in fashionable galleries, or flaunt itself to the posturing demigods of the avant-garde. Its only worth is in the sentimental value given to it by its secretive makers. In many people’s eyes, it simply should not exist. Marginalia, to be side stepped, like a steaming turd deposited on the kerb. Once, crap was art. Now, art is crap.

The vignettes that follow maybe incidentally real. In some instances, they were told by an idiot, to paraphrase the marble-bearded bard.  They waver in and out of meaning, occupying the bald patch beneath the fringe. Written in alternating green, violet, blue, orange and red ink. Recorded in a pocketbook, in Lilliputian script. Some of these incidents were dreamt about afterwards and that is the version recounted here. That is the sum of it. Scruff and fluff, mangled and half digested morsels, spat out only to be scrutinised by the inquisitive.

Pompeiian Pygmies:

Through the many cracks and fissures, something theatrical in tempera occurs. It’s a river Nile rout, painted by an unknown Roman hand:  uncovered in 1882 from the Physician’s House in Pompeii, Italy. Pot-bellied pygmies do gory battle with monstrous crocodiles, or greatly enlarged newts, attempting to enslave them in fetters, riding one (resembling a Dimetrodon) bare back,  swimming against a glaucous tide, lancing and somersaulting on this mottled waterway, covered with leprous blisters, that in time will obliterate every trace of this misadventure. An enraged hippopotamus gorges on a pygmy, reducing his head and brains to crimson squish. The surrounding scene, follows its own peculiar perspective, enlarging and shrinking with alarming abandon, as we scan the landscape eyes agog, wondering if there is something wrong with our perception of space. A primordial massacre is underway. Houses and their doubles appear and disappear, a black swan forming an inverted letter S swoops in from the left, there are four steps leading up to an abandoned, outsized villa. The vast and slithering things have hauled themselves up onto the mudflats, through the rocks and reeds, to greedily devour those industrious little people. Why? You may ask indeed. Naples is a city where you are never far from the miraculous.

One January, some threadbare years ago, I found myself in a shabby zone of Napoli, far from the grand thoroughfares and triumphant avenues with their arches and edifices. Along the litter strewn way, I encountered a dead rat underfoot, warm and spongy, as my heel pressed down on its backbone. Looking up at a myriad of tiny windows, where cobalt lights blinked on and off at random,  I saw the inquisitive faces of pygmies peering down at me. One laughed so manically it unnerved me. A sort of hysterical utterance, bordering on the animalistic. This triggered off a chain reaction, with others unseen, hidden behind lopsided screens and blinds, more menacing than musical,  joining the momentum to form an infernal chorus.  All the while, trapped in this unfolding drama, I could only think of a jaw’s harp, twanging in unison to the sibilance of the crumbling city. Looking up, I could see the protuberant tongue, so reminiscent of medieval art, with its fork-tongued demons and scarlet eyes.

Bun House Year One

A concrete yard with its solitary green stem poking up through a crack. Grubby children play with a dead animal. It is headless and reeking. They throw stones and bits of mortar at the  mutilated cadaver to try to see the purple tubes inside. Their father, who is also purple, looks on approvingly. Hours of buffoonery, of slipping under tables, only to re-emerge on the other side, wide-eyed and startled, arriving as if in a new incarnation, sped by the sap that rises, first pink, then ashen cheeked. Gnawing at the Formica in mock-hunger.  Flushed and vituperative; oblivion of phantom afternoons all concertina into one, black with the oily reside of inner-city pollutants inching down the back wall. Across the way, a faceless murder in the underpass. Spoken about in vague ruminations and hooded gestures. It happened before dawn near the corner shop that always guarantees free credit for its’ tottering customers.

The language of walls tells of scuff marks and  urinating contests. This alleyway is a gallery superimposed with chalky scribblings, the souvenirs of a shuffling, blurred crowd, high on inhalants and juice. Here, nightmares are coloured with a terrible beauty. Perhaps, by the ghost of someone like Gaston Chaissac (1910-64) the cobbler’s son,  who lived on lemon infused potatoes. Gaston’s walls were backdrops for his painted stones, fashioned into liminal houses, wherein the spectres of his imagination found refuge. And what of Chaissac’s misshapen tomfoolery, his 1940’s  graffiti and multi-coloured monstrosities? What rags have wiped away these contrivances, only to see them reappear elsewhere, on other surfaces? Souvenirs survive in half-remembered photographs, glimpsed some 30 years ago in remaindered books. Nobody living can testify to the birth of these banished totems.     End to end, these pictograms seethe and writhe, gap-toothed expressions in a decomposing history of urban expression. They follow an awkward inner-truth and are executed with an authenticity often redolent  in children’s drawings. Half a bleary eye captures this memory in a nail bitten membrane, mapping it out on the sweating brickwork, in the handiwork of drug-infused stealth. Cored, boned and cleaved from the deep interior of the tunnel, with its festering lagoons, shattered glass and exploded aerosols. The only audience now is a charred Barbie doll. Hurled into this intestinal passage as an offering to the degenerate underbelly gods of the city.  

Knock Knapp

147. A house and a half apparently, with a section painted Californian blue because the paint was ultra cheap, explosives and drums under the bed, garden of  unstable lean-to lock up’s, a hirsute hermit’s grotto for the display of enlarged testicles scorched by mismanaged fireworks, collapsing picket fence engulfed with foliage, the cause of many protracted disputes between this side and that, a child’s trampoline, overflowing Victorian lavatory, library of bad joke books. When crossing the threshold, the rotten floorboards imploded, patched up with improbably thick off-cuts and improvisations, often too high for the safe transit of shoe heels. A place of wild and astonishing behaviour, the rowdy antics of borderline personality disorder gone berserk of an evening, high on wine and melodrama. How many autumnal barbeques of singe and soot flavoured gristle were marinaded in lighter fuel? The tapping and drumming on an industrial scale, in unscored rhythms, that beat out the end of the century in all its existential fugues, with fire eaters upstaged by the darkest corporeal fantasies and thumbnail sketches from beyond the kitchen sink, where the worm buries itself against this brainstorm.  Is this place a squat, asked the lenticular art dealer, sporting his Technicolor smile, accompanied by a fake gibbon in an artist’s smock.   Is this something I can put in my gallery?

The vignettes that follow have been ‘curated’ over the course of a year. Jotted down in a small orange spiral bound notebook, in an even tinier, ink-stained script, I recorded the incidental oddments and images that populate this bric-a-brac culture as encountered. The end-product is a meandering eclecticism that borders on the tangential. It’s a meeting point for gravitational nihilism. Each sentence tells a covert story, in a concoction of spliced narrative and anecdote. So bountiful are the littered alleyways of the bric-a-brac culture, that we only need pick at them to reveal what lurks underneath, travelling back and forth, stumbling in the mud, watching the woodlice flee as we kick away the detritus.

Going dotty

The year is obsolete and so brittle that great care must be taken to avoid flaking. Sensitive to touch like a moth’s intricately patterned wing. The suburban dot punctuates a collapsing magazine. Its spine is filled with magical ornamentation. Clues, curses, conundrums, all are embedded.

Prized from the river’s fetid treacle, a sherd of glass is held between thumb and forefinger. LENS. Through a scratched and iridescent haze, we can see swirling dots that appear to drift in constellations. They oscillate in a flotilla of pink, green and black. Forming glyphs, wriggling insignia, gyrations. All the signs beckon to the eye: I was here and saw this. Through this low tide monocle, we view the writhing ectoplasm of regeneration, dissolving and reconfiguring to become a happening, rather like an animated storyboard. Pink dominates, then devours the expanding vista, gobbling up the yellow to become a fluorescent green. Pacman as a gourmet devouring deity. This reminds us of Saprophytes; microscopic organisms that feed on dead and decaying organic matter. Back on the page, our likenesses occupy a cityscape, delineated in black and grey lines, overlaid with shading. We are cartoons depicted in the slang of the era as it trickles over the edge. Down into the bubbling slime, consumed by the river of throw-away household gods, in a collective gurgle. Spiralling inside the sewer pipe, in a maelstrom of rapid-fire belches.

Technicolor was an overactive age of ink. Soon engulfed by a great Stygian brown of post-war austerity. This blemish is occlusion caused by brain fog. Speech is only possible in bubbles that have yet to be pierced with a glass-headed pin, releasing tinny voices in whirling vortices. These are the prophecies of things to come, sloughing off towards an incoming chocolate swell. Frothing with yellowish spume. All around us, these nuclei groove, collide, and overlap in cosmic superimposition. There goes a scurrying paper mite, busily gorging its way from one tale to another. Consuming the red first, and then the green, in a frenzy of post-pointillist hoovering. Eating so many words and pictures until all faces resemble barbarous fungi. Those calcified idols, who grimace and leer in drains, inhabit dripping brick tunnels beneath slumbering cities. Malign and impious, they augur witchery in onyx eyes. Cult of the tilt, the rotational optic. Gradually surveying the horizon, in the roundabout gaze of an afterthought. Finally, the river slick meets the soft cover of a lukewarm dream. All is engulfed and flushed away with the swift action of hand on handle. Whoosh!

crystal garden

A crystal awakening. Imagine if we could be shrunk to the size of an atom like in old science fiction movies. Entering the column of the citadel is tantalising and alien. Inside its frozen liquidity there are inclusions: ice thistles, tinsel moss, lichens that leach out in ossified, arterial probes. Splintered, skeletal appendages, a rutile tangle of golden hair. A spangling, conversational rainbow. The oblong water droplet bulges: an incunabulum. Resident X-Ray phantoms, leave multiple summits, stacked on top of one another, like forgotten, discarded histories. When capturing passing light, the crystal ignites into multi-coloured transmission mode. Speaking to us in spectroscopic epiphanies. Once it is heated, it exudes a deep blue that radiates like the aura captured in Kirlian photographs. Such a blue does not exist in the world of artifice. It is deeply resonant and capable of transporting the beholder into a thicket of vegetal encrustation within the frosted matrix. We are encased in a volatile hailstorm for millennia. 

About face

Aimless wanderings around the deserted square mile, during a time of masked quarantine, yield chance discoveries. Above street corners and cemented into the walls of grand 1929 buildings, are the immortal heads of commerce. Bearded titans and sentinels, festooned with inedible flowers and gritty fruit, their curious stony countenances locked in toothy stares. Some are coiffured or wimpled, perched on shit smeared pedestals. Out of earshot, we whisper and gesticulate in slow motion. Who are they and what do they signify? A greatly enlarged version of a medieval pewter pilgrim badge adorns a modern shop entrance: Thomas A Becket. The martyr who had his head stoved in at Canterbury, once lived on a site near this spot. What would he make of it now? 

The entrance to a patio garden; claw marks surround a grille – a grinning cat’s head in gold filigree. Dating back further in time, stored in subterranean receptacles: decapitated marble heads, chipped and striated, the angular, chiselled heroes of vanished Romans. What stories do they tell one another after lights out, through a history of creaks and cracks? Do they know we even exist? What if stone contains a trace memory?

Phases of Grey

In urban terms, grey defines the vanishing point where the city fuses with clouds to become disappearance. Often bruised and battered, like the innards of an old suitcase, greyness is hurled onto a rubbish heap like some abortion.  No Fly Tipping. Or so the sign reads.

Skin: washed out, existential, anaemic, nicotine-stained greybeards. Sodden newspapers left outdoors to rapidly dissolve. A liquidised language of grisaille. Grey conversations barked into fist sized screens. Why? What do you mean why? Yeah, Nah, Yeah, Nah. I just said that didn’t I? Pinch lines around grey mouths, indentations of puckered malice. Grey longing for green, in the damp vacuum of Winter’s rictus. Grey of the roadkill, left by the kerbside to time lapse into livid blubber. Grey hairs sucked from scalps covered in blood crystals, inhaled deep into the spider holes of night. Monochrome photographs, before the fusion of colour dots. Quicksilver eyes, that inhabit photographs of the long dead, see themselves in the nameless faces of their forebears. Grey in the lattice and furrow of the brow, filthy crevices and wrinkles of the neck. The greased lenses of the myopic, fumbling towards a fingerprinted window. Squeaking a likeness on the breathed glass – a great balloon face. 

Across the city, people in grey uniforms pretend to drive cars, making noises that mimic acceleration, then sudden braking. All the time, they are seated on grey swivel chairs. Some may fantasize about becoming avant-garde composers with artfully tousled grey locks, being interviewed for television documentaries, with protracted um’s and ah’s in the style of feigned distraction peculiar to genius. Others are trapped in a bureaucratic drabness of their own innate tedium. Grey of dandruff and decline. Of microwaved meals, forked into a soggy grey mulch. Grey of empty days. Grey of the excluded and insane. Grey of solidified vomit, pecked by pigeons. Of cigarette smoke and sagging eyelids. Grey fuzz of monitor screens in the wee hours.  Grey of crumpled shopping lists, toilet rolls, and spat toothpaste. Grey of dead leaves, alcoves and sculptures that nobody will ever see. Grey of Morandi’s bottles and jars accumulating dust. Grey of the expelled, unable to befriend a colour. Grey of faltering memory fashioned into lumpen figurines, placed beneath dead trees. Naming the grey in a decolourized world without hope.

Spindle Vortex Machine

At the 1905 Kitson villa in Sicily, I stand before a marble mantelpiece. My eye is lured to the spindle vortex machine, which sits underneath a gleaming glass dome. Carved by Napoleonic prisoners of war, from whittled and polished bovine bone, this fragile automaton has survived 200 years. When the front lever is wound, it releases a series of spinning cogs and wheels, which turn this way and that, sending the apparatus into operation. A lady rocks her baby in its crib from side to side, another attends a trundling spinning wheel. Three bonneted Georgian ladies rotate in some forgotten dance, to an unheard melody. The whole effect is charming and mesmeric. These machinations have been performed hundreds (perhaps thousands) of times, running for just a few brief moments before slowing, then stopping. Every twist of the ornate crank brings them to life for a brief performance, no matter what the occasion.

Cutting corners

All this cutting is a curious phenomenon, removing images from ravaged books and magazines to create a new, albeit fragmentary, incarnation. The shears riffle through slightly faded paper which exudes a distinct musty odour. This is the trapped smell of the 1940’s. Along the paper’s edge, you can see a zigzagging movement, that evinces the flourish of a stop/start escapade of scissors. This is a new story of landscape transplanted into a mysterious topography. In this place, there is a typography that stands in for dialect, which is the accent of uncharted exploration. In the lost provinces of the cut and paste there is presence within absence. What we no longer see is supplanted by something apparent in the negative void. A picture removed from its page is now a frame around what? The photographic multiplication of landscapes where colour and monochrome coexist simultaneously. How incredibly blue that sky looks, even though we are under perpetual cover of night. That was a blue special to the 1930s way of seeing things. We cannot emulate that blue again, not now. 

Collage is a process of reinventing pictorial reality, of connecting things that are paradoxical by threads of random association, it’s a process of inference and interference. Similarly, the dead, in their muted garments haunt the deserted streets as printed in monochrome over 80 years ago. Are these distillations of dreams, or psychodramas, played out by mute actors placed on pause? Is this a place where convergent realities meet with hypnotized strangers? We occupy these fantasias, formed from a shifting inventory of pictures. Collage is all about trimming the weirdness that resides within these lines and pasting all of yesterday’s offcuts sometime in the future.

UR rum blur

river dream, Wapping steps 

rum blur, ummmmm 

an obs UR ovation 

indigo 

headless idiot, descends into green 

noises machine thrum 

mini armature  

down the slipshod to black clout 

vision of trepanned oracle. 

hole in one 

birth 

peripheral species 

altar to the odd 

scorched pebble  

geological full-stop

Blabbermouth revisited

Back to the Bellarmine. Its grizzled, fierce visage, pronged eyebrows. Weirdie beardie. Spout head. Gargoyle. Tell Tom Tit. Counter hex, filled with piss, bent iron nails, felt hearts, nail parings. Buried in the blackness.

A stone head was unearthed in 1895 by a workman digging a well near the Rue des Murlins, in the city of Orleans. The Stone of the Chatterers, was a cruel punishment for gossiping women, worn from the 14th to the 16th centuries. The head depicted, dates to the early 1600s and was kept in the cellar of the Chatelet with other torture implements, until it was made obsolete after October 9th 1789, when torture in France was abolished. The head was worn on a chain or chord around the neck of the accused, as a symbol of brutal humiliation. These images are both from postcards printed in 1907 in a re-enactment scene.

Through the mottled prism of pink fluorite, I dream of my dead friend’s hoard of foreshore finds: trinkets from an unknown donor, stored in a child’s satchel, a careworn briefcase and several broken drawers. When we first met, she brushed my trousers with white paint as if to demarcate our friendship. I did not envision that some thirty something years later I would watch her ashes disperse into the sea, turning the water into a milky cataract. I recall her secretive visits to the river, the poking and probing, foraging in the bilge and ooze, the insatiable quest for the ultimate tidal trophy. The collection was off limits to my eyes, which exacerbated an already avid curiosity. The years passed. The ghost of the child whose photographic negative was found under the floorboards migrated to another dimension. The house where clubs were once held, was gutted and finally imploded, leaving my friend homeless and almost toothless. The thirst for acquisition was supplanted by alcohol and the temporary mindlessness that strong liquor brings. The collection soon sank into oblivion, floundering at the bottom of a bottle, like a life half lived. One day, after several inactive silent days, she was discovered dead in bed. Her marvellous sculptures of singing heads, with their mouths agape, rounded into an O, sang no more madrigals. Another noise maker was drafted in, to articulate the mute, sputtering and invoking the wake within the wormy bedpost, giving oscillation to the creature that lives inside the baby’s skull.  The same skull that was carried around for years in her bag. 

April 2022-April 2023

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For a start, the black visage is very horrible and frightening to look at, and particularly the red sunken eyes under the fearful black brows, which are fit to make the weather cloudy and make the earth tremble.
Leonardo da Vinci ‘Fantastic Descriptions’

This is the peculiar history of a pocket stuffed with all manner of oddities, a repository for uncategorised storage, concealment, and potential transformation. A former naval pea coat came into my possession several years ago and was second hand at the time of its arrival. With a tall, angular, collar that can be made to stand on end, it adds dramatic emphasis to the head, lending it something of a sinister Max Schreck* look. It also has two deep pockets to the front, where articles can be sequestered away. These have carried so many items that through the passage of days, months and years, have worn away, incrementally fraying and loosening the stitches, collapsing the inner lining, where objects have become temporarily lodged in a topsy-turvy turmoil. Thus, the pocket serves as a portmanteau, portable studio and library – all in one.

Many of the commodities deposited inside the coat have their own bizarre, fractured narratives, as they are transported from one place to another, wrapped loosely in pieces of paper, bound with elastic bands. The more pedestrian things might include: S shaped paperclips, barely legible, faded tickets and receipts, dried up pens, a broken pencil, knotted shoelaces, yellowed teabags, ketchup stained serviettes, a flattened matchbox, cotton handkerchief with monster motif, shopping lists, a plastic spoon, a stray mouth lozenge covered in fluff, electrical tape, a bottle top, newspaper photos, a comb missing some teeth, shard of wing mirror, various brown and grey hairs, creased calling cards grubby with grime, phone with sweat imprints resembling alien beings, candy wrappers, blunt nail file – any attempt at a complete inventory is futile.

One spring day, I spotted a piece of rubber wire and quickly pocketed it for possible use in one of my sculptures. Much later, when I placed my hand inside to retrieve the cable it presented a deep mauve, the colour of mature bruises or ripe berry juice. Careful study revealed that it was actually a cartridge from a leaking ballpoint pen. Purple blotches appeared on my fingers like some undiagnosed malady, mapping out a previously unexplored terra incognita. This sputtering reservoir seemed to be giving birth to bluish punctuation marks, manufacturing arabesque curlicues, cuneiform script. To all appearances, what could be discerned as a crudely applied body tattoo made by a hamfisted amateur, indelibly inked on my hand. Minuscule seeds wedged in the corners of the pocket turned hyacinth, and once removed, expanded then sprouted within a week when planted in compost. The world glimpsed through a cracked lens is infinitely fascinating to the eye ravenous for metamorphosis.

A Christmas altercation with two candles splashed orange wax onto the coat which trickled inside the pocket to form a solidified bolus, in which multiple particles were bonded in an unlikely agglomeration. Attempts to melt the wax with a steaming iron were unsuccessful and only exacerbated the situation, causing scorch marks and an acrid stench. Pinpricks of trapped migratory food products (crumbs, grease, sugar and salt) coalesced to become the ingredients of an inedible snack. This is what I later termed a Precipice Recipe and incorporated it into a show at the Freud Museum in London. Seen through a honeycomb of viewpoints and telescopic screens this is indeed, a meal fit for a fly.

Gods on a keyring

I possess a number of iconic pewter charms, collected during the past twenty something years: a green man sports a foliate whorl of a beard, the Hand of Fatima, emblazoned with rubbed blue and red enamels (bought in a Tunisian street market), a Sheela Na Gig exposes her pudendum and leering mouth, a Celtic boar with bristled back (lost for 2 years in the mesh of a wicker basket) a Viking spiral head with goggle eyes. All of these deities and ex votos are looped together by a series of interlocking rings that jangle in the oblivion of the pocket.

Nomen est Omen – the name is power. The notion that these keyrings are in some way talismanic, conveys a totemic energy when manipulated between finger and thumb. There is something reassuring about the click-clack as they are manually rotated. Peering into their dull metallic surfaces, you can just about make out the hint of quivering grey reflections exaggerated by elongation and sudden diminution. This brings to mind some of the earliest photographic experiments, in which pioneers of optics and chemistry attempted to fix an image on surfaces such as aluminium foil, silver plated copper, paper or leather, with variable and sometimes astonishing results. Observing reflections in polished objects, gives rise to the phenomenon of scrying, channelling hallucinations into a form of prophesy. The nature of these images are fleeting and fluid, they do not leave fixed impressions, only reticulate associations in the mind of the seer. In a similar way, too much ink seeps through thin paper to form a back to front sentence when viewed from the other side: an unknown language of phantom utterances.

Wooden Heads Revisited

Several years ago, during a visit to the church of St Mary and St Nicholas in Beaumaris, on the Isle of Anglesey (North wales) I stumbled across a fabulous throng of late 15th to early 16th century misericords* carved on benches. Here lives a whole contingent of wooden heads, mostly of men, women, and androgynous Bacchic youths. With curiosity and a sense of hushed reverence, I went about photographing these 500 year old* carvings in the subdued light. As I framed my images through the viewfinder, I heard a distinct creak and wondered if this was the clandestine voice of the misericord, occurring perhaps now and then, punctuated by decades or centuries of silence, augmented by the doleful voices of singers, the clatter of skeletal remains ransacked by crows, the furtive scurry of a disturbed spider. Could this be a communication? Unfortunately, time would not permit me to wait for a response. Instead, I studied the faces staring blankly back at me, with their eccentric coiffures – beehives, loaves, wimples, crowns, heraldic hats. At this point, I considered the misericords to be arcane friends of sorts, who posed more riddles than I could decipher. Some heads grew from vines, fattened like gourds about to drop, bobbing on undulating umbilical cords, chittering in a secretive, splintered verbatim, barely audible to the human ear. I vouched to revisit the church and spend another daydreaming session with my adopted kin.

For nearly 2 years the church has been padlocked and to my chagrin, I have not been able to enter. This year, the makeshift gods of chance have been more benevolent and I was able to glimpse the misericords at distance, from behind a sagging red silk cordon. I could position myself at the threshold and just make out their tonsures, curls, and spiky crowns. But there could be no interface or communion with these ancient sentinels. One must reinvigorate and excavate memories, flick through images stored in my phone’s gallery for a reminder of their honey coloured features, rubbed smooth by the touch of hands, now all turned to dust.

Eternal Dreamers

Here they slumber beneath a great window. Laying side by side; speechless to the profusion of their crazing and craquelure. Feet propped on a disproportionate lion and snub-nosed hound. Spangles of ruby and cobalt light ripple across their torsos, giving the semblance of animation, of filmic projection, passing over them like some mesmeric experiment. Will this wake the effigies or extend their dreaming? Over their grizzled, gnarled faces, an epiphany within the glass splays the colour of prayer, painting them in shimmering waves of prismatic rainbows.

Aside, a fluted arpeggio machine fires up, pumping advancing rhythms and trills into the chapel. Is this the ghost of the last hymn they ever heard? Their frozen pitted heads, so filled with pictures of a time we can barely comprehend – an era of illuminated animalia dressed as people, braying and masturbating to the congregation within the margins of secret and profane parchments. Through the cantankerous rasping and sputtering of pipes we come closer, almost touching tomorrow through the abstract unfurling of sounds. Trickling from the corners of their mouths like ransid spittle, names and years are stylized in chiselled graffiti, trapped deep in the furrows of their drapery, marooned in the folds like banished iconoclasts. Spelling out the names of the forgotten dead in curling, looping initials. The anonymous mark makers decorated the sleeping couple with their own identities, so their speech bubbles will continue to inflate and burst, raining snores, mumbles, and the malaise of never ending brainless sleep on this place.

Inside the Matrix Maker

Reflections on the sculpture, The Lightning by Lesley Hilling

The matrix maker inhabits a lofty room, with its leprous ceiling, at the top of a church on the Walworth Road. One rainy afternoon, I was invited to visit and ushered into the inner sanctum for an expedition into the matrix. The stupendous tower before me entitled ‘The Lightning ‘ was constructed from hundreds of pieces of recycled adapted wood, arranged to form a column, rising from dark to light. On a workbench, many tiny spindles and sections are glued and clamped together in a riotous mesh of protrusions and appendages that go to form the viscera of the matrix. The maker does not reveal the methodology of these constructions and there is no apparent blueprint – the densely packed web of structures just seems to proliferate ad infinitum. You are left to ponder similarities with aerial maps of imaginary city grids teeming with alleyways and trajectories, walkways, platforms, and slanting corridors. Somewhere along the line, there has been a rendezvous with a de-constructed Bolshevik geometry. This has now followed its own nose.

The entrancement of entering the matrix is in knowing that you will become lost and find one of the maker’s memories in the guise of a vintage photograph, tucked into a minuscule compartment, framed by an expanding galaxy of boltholes and casements that invariably lead back to a point of ingress. Here and there, are optical lenses which afford a closer view of the grain, its clockwork parts. Residual cogs and springs filched from an autopsy of battered clocks that stopped ticking long ago. This simulacrum of inner machinery also reminds the explorer that this could be a paradigm shift device, its exact purpose yet undisclosed. The iterations of memory that occur in the matrix are the select biography of the maker. We see what they want us to know about their life, in the handiwork of an elusive innovator. Occasionally, the experiencer will collide with a little white porcelain doll* (Frozen Charlotte) who pops up within the infrastructure to greet us. Hello.

The architectural potential of the matrix is turned on its head when we meet other pedestrians travelling through this seething complex, as if stuttering along on a conveyor belt towards the nucleus. Where do they go and what are they for? Turn another corner and you come face to face with several animal skulls, pristine, bleached, feline craniums – like one might find in an 18th century wunderkammer. Perhaps we have arrived at the terminus? The theatricality of the matrix is brimming with infinite dramas, in plays that have yet to be enacted, disclosed to us in sectors of an ever burgeoning parallelism. The fantasy element of this structure lies in its intricate inner scaffolding, which is akin to the hive, or power house at the end of a remembered dream. It just keeps on promulgating itself and therein, lies its momentum.

Fragment of a conversation between two children, overheard on a train.

That’s the junkyard where they break it up. Then they break it up again. They just keep breaking it up until there’s nothing left to break.

In the Ravine

Found in the sallow endpapers of a book: a newspaper cutting from 1993. Exactly 28 years to the day have elapsed since it was last inserted. I am looking at an eidolon. Black and grey dots oscillate, forming a fugitive trace that is fleeting and ethereal. The eye struggles at first to make sense of what could be a reproduction of a Baroque painting. One can almost distinguish phantom figures dressed in costumes, bearing lances, plumed helmets. A rocky edifice can be discerned. Is this a grotto? There are dark alcoves and arches leading to where? A large number seven appears below the picture like a ledge for it to sit on. After numerous inspections it is possible to establish that this could be a staged event. A ceremony? The static ghosts trapped in this monochrome pointillism are ever so tiny. No bigger than 20 millimetres. Bits of words appear, like chopped up sentences, crackling transmissions from the netherworld: perfect set, Experi, Mac, ooks, erona bravo, usile. When the paper is unfolded a giant oriental head floats momentarily before our gaze, suddenly dissolving into thin air. This is the god of the dissected word, the deity of the dot. I refold the clipping and place it back in its stained crack, in the dried-up glue of the ravine where language ends and images speak to us in this unfathomable syntax.

Mirror Image

The cover of a book, printed in 1950, shows us a young woman applying lipstick, looking into a mirror. One side of the picture is in negative but has enhanced colour: The other side is in positive, in Agfacolor. This colour photography was developed in the 1940’s and has rich, saturated hues, in reproduction that do not seem to fade. Although the dustjacket is creased and wrinkled it still evinces a visceral beauty, rather like period technicolor films, with their exaggerated blues and reds, their sizzling pinks and scorching yellows. Films of this era are like sumptuous living paintings.

April-November 2021.

Notes:

Max Schreck was the charismatic German actor who played Dracula in F.W. Murnau’s film of 1920.

Misericords are wooden carvings usually found on or underneath church benches. They are whimsically jocular, sometimes profane, and nearly always eccentric to our eyes. Some of the misericords in the church of St Mary and St Nicholas, Beaumaris, were recreated in 1902 as replacements for those that disintegrated.

Frozen Charlottes are small, white porcelain dolls, manufactured in the middle of the Victorian era. They were usually put into puddings as surprise gifts for children. Their name comes from an 1843 melodramatic ballad about a young lady who froze to death, hence the term ‘Frozen’ Charlotte.

I know a man that makes always Smell to the people a smell calld -Groudlisquicki He loves you very much and will send you in a paper 3 bad smelling bousems or some bad smellings eare.

Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882-1962)
French author and psychoanalyst closely associated with Freud
Five Copy Books Vol. III (1952)

Through the convoluted distortion of memory, I attempt to recall a scene, arranged as series of transparencies inside a clunking slide projector, only to find the projections semi-obliterated and discoloured; fuzzy photographs that have now become reinvented as thoughtographs, teleplasmic traces, pictures in the mind’s eye that seem to form the fragments of an unreliable story. 

The setting is a small front garden in Flodden Road, in the early 1980’s. Displayed within a paved forecourt are a mass of dolls in varying stages of decay; leprous, jaundiced faces with brutally dented cheeks, glass eyes turned insanely inwards, sun bleached skin, hair rinsed grey by acid rain. This ghoulish cabal  reminds me of the Palermo catacombs, with suspended mummies, their imbecilic peeling faces, matted hair flaked with plaster, grimacing in silent protest at the invasive eyes that parade in slow motion before them, expunged by the quivering glitch.

I traversed the street several times a day. The encounter with the grotesque garden always gave occasion for pause, as new additions emerged over the blur of time and seasons – soon it became festooned with gaudy plastic cemetery flowers and soggy eviscerated toy animals. Nobody ever spied the curator of this outdoor undertaking. Perhaps it was created under cover of dark – a nocturnal labour of love? Bulbous artificial fruits lay scattered on the patio as  votive offerings to the effigies dangling from knotted, blackened strings. It was an ornamental feature of Italian Baroque gardens (I am thinking here, of the spectacular Giardino Giusti in Verona) to flourish a huge cornucopia of stone oranges, lemons and pears, as an  appeasement to the gods that secretly lurk in the dank undergrowth.

Beneath the garden there is another world, a thrumming tuber matrix of enmeshed root networks connecting the living with the dead, writhing deep into the tentacular blackness, a circulatory system for the underworld. This microcosm is populated by insects, that criss-cross tangled highways and byways in frantic teeming hordes. Roots act as syphons, filters, and dynamos, pounding and pumping,  giving succour to the plants that thrust above the topsoil, probing and poking through the cracks and fissures, winding their tendrils around poles and pedestals with promiscuous dexterity, gradually overwhelming and engulfing the place in a verdant, shimmering tapestry of weeds. 

During one week in Spring I noticed a trickle of centipedes spewing from the mouth of one of the largest doll’s heads. This exodus may have been prompted by dislodging the colony that inhabited the cavity. A flurry of thousands of tiny legs quickly relocated to the comparative sanctuary under seldom moved bricks.

In 1985 I visited the infamous Islington Arts Factory, which was housed in a gloomy Victorian chapel. This run-down venue hosted many eclectic events: live performance art that routinely involved the stomping and grinding of corn flakes inside a pair of oversize wellington boots, whilst the nonchalant performer smoked a cigarette with a certain smirking arrogance. There were also interminable concrete poetry recitals given by misanthropic misfits wearing beer stained  Tee shirts over voluminous bellies, avant-garde music concerts that were silenced by sudden power cuts, crudely edited Super 8 films and scratch video festivals.

I remember a jerky, hand operated, slide presentation augmented by a narrator. The images were actual photographs of people and places that had been scribbled over with felt tip pens in a vortex of alterations. Every picture was scored by a stylus in the clandestine vernacular of automatic, spirit writing. With no progressive narrative structure, it felt like an excursion into a rambling dream diary. Nevertheless, I found myself lured into this dreamscape by the monotonous intonation, with its abrupt stops, starts, and shifts in tempo – the delivery of an uncertain, tremulous orator. The profusion of images flickering on that screen reminds me of a striking painting from J. H. Plokker’s book: Artistic Self Expression in Mental Illness (1964). This rare publication is one of the first surveys of schizophrenic art with colour illustrations and  period psychiatric commentary. 

Plokker’s Figure in a street

A faceless green waif in a drab sloping street, with lopsided houses that could have been grafted from an expressionist composition, is captured by the brush of an unknown, unnamed painter. The book’s analysis of this picture leans towards social disintegration and isolation. It regards the use of putrid green and yellow to exemplify a feeling of dystopian dread and unease. I  consider the figure in the street as a genderless being. It has abnormally long clawed arms  and wears an all-in-one covering. Perhaps it is a post-apocalyptic mutant? The painting certainly emanates a loss of identity with the merging of the soft cityscape and the troll-like figure in the foreground. 

Dream Fragment

8 February 2021

Shoreditch apartment. After years of hoarding.  The entrance corridor is crammed almost to the ceiling with bin bags stuffed with unbearable refuse, unwanted clothing,  shrivelled shoes. Acute difficulty with manoeuvring over this surface. Broken glass cabinet with stale bread crumbs, holes bored in the wood, eye sockets,  scored graffiti faces leer. View from the window is mostly of factories. This is a gigantic photograph, not an actual scene. Chewing bread and rolling it in the palm of the hand to form malleable dough. This is fashioned into heads for veneration in a cult. A split tongue sputters unintelligible sounds over them.

The Man in the Poor House

Squirming at the corner of the eye, skittering shades of lives lived and exhaled. The ghost walker is not housebound, it stalks where ever I go. Dulled eyes are blackened with prophetic insights. Prophecies lurk in the thumbed creases of photographs,  crumbling book spines; unwelcome truths yet to be revealed, lure  us into the  province of the chittering weevil.   

A  greatly deteriorated sepia photograph came into my custody and inspires multiple narratives. It shows an elderly bearded man with white hair, seated in a landscape, surrounded by four ramshackle wooden huts that may be latrines. In the background, there are a few spindly, leafless trees. The photograph is so feint that you must peer closely to discern even these details. On the back is written in a lilting graphite script: Man in poorhouse age 100. A portion of the image is now lost, leaving a whitish triangular shaped void that is a portal to another dimension. The subject resembles some medieval pilgrim and is bedecked in a gown, perched on a covered plinth that could be a stump. He glances to the side, not directly at the camera. Surrounding the picture there is an irregular mount, time worn, grubby and chipped. One can clearly envisage the many filthy hands that have held this photo, the blackened finger nails and cracked cuticles.  This disintegrating portrait carries such a metaphysical presence despite its condition flaws, making us question the nature of capturing time and the persistence of fading apparitions. The feelings of abandonment and alienation the photograph conveys are similar to those delineated in  Plokker’s Figure in a street.

Giving Up the Ghost

Before long everything will be organised; we await a very evil century. The state of the masked and the solitary ones greatly changed, few will find that they wish to retain their rank.

Nostradamus, Century Two

We met in a corner café. I do not remember her name. She was young and ultra-talkative in a bird like way.  Told me it was her ‘dream job’.  She had not long been in the post at the Romano – Germanic Museum in Cologne, before her induction was interrupted by a series of inexplicable happenings. These randomly occurred during the evening round of the galleries. Whilst checking the vitrines for bugs, she would suddenly intercept people with hideous, gaping wounds, bleeding, stumbling through dissipating smoke walls. They would appear and then almost instantaneously vanish. The curious thing was that they wore odd looking clothes. She  explained that this was shocking at first.  But in Mexico (her country of origin) people believed in spirits and had a sympathetic   relationship with supernatural phenomena. Some of the people she saw had parts of their faces missing, burnt flesh and singed hair. Others sobbed.  In order to understand why she saw these maimed bodies, it is necessary to look at the area in which the museum is situated – the zentrum.

Cologne was devastated by relentless bombing raids during the Second World War, with swathes of buildings razed and many civilians killed. The weird manifestations witnessed in the museum could be related to deaths that occurred in the 1940’s revealed as flashbacks, replayed like vintage film clips in faded colours, on an endless loop. The museum does not give up its ghosts easily.

Bone Emporium

Chapel Street Market, Islington, London. The curvaceous Victorian gold lettering spells out Cohen’s Furrier and Costumier above the shuttered window. But this establishment does not sell garments any more, it specialises in mummification and ossification, beak and claw taxidermy, and an ever increasing layer of long settled dust. On entering, I am greeted by a tiny octogenarian with a ragged shawl tightly wrapped around her skeletal shoulders. Her hair is dyed a faded tangerine and eyebrows have been pencilled in quizzical arches that meet to form an M when she frowns. She looks like someone who might inhabit the child-like painted street in J. Plokker’s book, hiding behind piles of bone.

May I help you?

I glance around this ossuary of animal, bird and fish trophies, each occupying their glass fronted sarcophagi with cracked painted interiors, dried flora, stones and shells glued crudely in place.  These ex-creatures are now dessicated, seeping a virulent  varnish from their stitched,  cured skins.  Cobwebbed skulls and antlers mounted on long forgotten plaques commemorate the grand day of the hunt in 1927. Everywhere there is bone dust, a yellowish powder that exudes the peculiar mustiness of death.  My gaze falls momentarily upon a monstrous catfish, its feelers like two withered antennae stretching out to beckon me into its brittle, xylophonic world, full of unexpurgated river stone dreams. How much is that? The answer is nearly always the same – £40. It’s as if the  crone of this emporium can only remember one figure. But few people come into this mausoleum and even less purchase anything. This gives me the negotiating upper hand. How about 3 heads for £40? You’re robbing me blind, but times ain’t as good as they used to be, so let’s say £50? I turn towards the door. The woman gives me the telescoping querulous glance peculiar to one about to lose a deal. With a heavy sigh £40 is agreed. I leave with the trio of stuffed fish heads wrapped in crumpled brown paper tied with raffia.

White Island

Summer 2010

Location: A tiny uninhabited island, in Lower Lough Erne, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.

After several unsuccessful attempts to reach White Island, I managed to convince a bemused boatman to take me out to this remote place, populated only by sheep. Why do you want to go there?’ he asked with an air of incredulity. 

If only you knew…

In the reconstructed open knave of a  church, there is a wall with 8 stone figures that date between 800 – 100 AD.  They have very large jutting chins and tiny oval eyes set close together, long aquiline noses, tonsured heads, hoods and cloaks. One carries a small shield, another holds a crosier and a bell. They could be representations of monks, abbots, or saints. One is certainly a Sheela-Na-Gig. The ribald exhibitionist who  flouts her open vagina to the unexpected visitor who lands on this shore, as if daring them to enter this enchanted grove. An undefined figure remains unborn, never fully carved from its block. This rudimentary, featureless effigy is accompanied by an adjacent single forlorn head for company. So what of this congregation of abandoned souls in stone? These sentinels were salvaged between the years 1830 – 1958 when they were impregnated into the wall as a group of spiritual guardians. Nearly all of them have nasal pinch marks, hinting at an inner serenity and the potential for laughter. They stare silently back, through centuries of weather and the ever encroaching spots of turquoise lichen. If we make connections with art we have experienced in our time (Cubism, folk and outsider art) does it enliven our communion with these other worldly wayfarers?   Will they break their long silence and speak to us through dreams, charting their scars on the city’s cold sleeping brow? Can we reanimate a notch for knowing them and determine an image of their origin?

Cut it Out

17.30 hrs Hoxton 2021

I am travelling home on the 394 bus through the deserted existential city, with its nocturnal portals covered in grime,  boarded up shop fronts,  wind-blown rubbish making a scuttling score for the cyclonic curfew hour, puddles reflecting the ruby orbs of oncoming traffic. Beyond the misted windows, disembodied voices speak in a language of dissonant hieroglyphics: barks, estuary consonants,  moaned bass blah blah’s. The journey is nearly always uneventful and tedious. 

A grey man seated in  front of me pulls some  paper from his bag and begins shearing the edges with scissors, snipping this way and that, trimming feverishly, as one might cut a mass of tousled hair. My curiosity increases as I watch him form little figures with crude features, each taking on its own personality in a collapsing concertina of jiggling dancers. Then, with an apparent change of heart, he stuffs these paper cut outs into his holdall, yawns and rummages for a plastic bottle containing cold milky tea. Gulping the liquid down greedily, he then turns to stare at me, emitting the most phenomenal belch I have ever heard.

Marie

Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882-1962) was a French aristocrat, author, and Freudian psychoanalyst. In 1952 she self-published her juvenile exercise books of 1892, complete with facsimiles of drawings, stories, and fantasies. Applying psychoanalysis to  her fusion of dreams and memoirs, Bonaparte evinces a deeply erotic explanation that veers towards the morbidly obsessive. As curiosities, these cryptic books make peculiar reading, taking the reader into the zone of a voyeur or eavesdropper. Written in  French, English, and German, they coalesce to form an imaginary language, that is both phonetic and spontaneous. These appear like experimental prose poems and require multiple readings to glean any rational sense or meaning. 

London November 2020 – March 2021

This article has grown from a montage of actual and imagined memories, dream fragments, interspersed with enigmatic objects, augmented by a chorus of simultaneous voices, pieced together without adhesive, in a time of immense shrivelling. It is offered here as a series of incomplete vignettes which should be viewed as erratic snippets, like talismans churned up by the tides, impregnated with unfathomable narratives.

Plastic Bags (1985- )

Who collects plastic bags? These eco-unfriendly archaeological anomalies of the future will almost certainly survive us all and last a thousand years or more, encountering the myopic scrutiny of our troglodytic, shuffling descendants with their suppurating sores. What sort of person would spend their time looking for mass produced, scrunched up, bags?  The answer in short, is another version of me.

The earliest plastic bag I possess dates to 1985 and is still used today to contain 80 small Zen ink drawings that I employed in a long forgotten, smoke filled,  decapitated pig’s head of performance, during a particularly existential phase in my progression, when words like ‘neurosis’ and ‘transgression’ were all the rage in the concrete art salons of Hornsea . The transparency of this polythene bag has gradually become opaque, similar to a cataract surrounding an iris. Its surface is incredibly wrinkled and every time I touch it a sort of powdery  residue  turns my hand grey. The fact that this pouch has protected my drawings for so long,  forces me to regurgitate snapshots of a red and black, shaven headed, youthful incarnation seldom glimpsed in obliterated photographs. Such is the imaginative potential engendered by fetishization.

Other bags seem to spell out quite a different craze influenced by the Japanese philosophy of wabi sabi – the appreciation of beauty in deterioration and imperfection.  Supermarket carrier bags were originally manufactured in cheerfully vivid colours, so that they would reiterate a positive customer experience. Combined with the tinny, synthesized muzak, played on an endless tape, with the subliminal, come back again message, prompted zombified shoppers in their spotless, futuristic malls, surrounded by plastic plants, to remember their visit in a consumer style nirvana.   Now after decades of atmospheric changes and exposure to ultra violet light, these bags have transformed into pock marked second skins.  Their crummy advertising mottos seem less charged and more ambiguous to our restless screen-obsessed  gaze: ‘It’s clean, it’s fresh, at …’ hesitantly proclaims one, whilst another announces, ‘Savecentre’  with its  cerulean blue, nuclear family  depicted carrying a shopping bag. One 1980’s store bag has 12 parallel cobalt blue bars, like hexagrams stripped of their divination power, surrounding the store logo in  iconic red: Today’s Tesco.  My stash of bags was recently chewed up by mice in the studio, to provide them with shredded nesting materials.

Totally Wired

A greedy bed bug that lives under my pillow, and regularly sucks my blood,  hurries back and forth in the same way that my finger (cracked pink) weaves gold wire thread through loops and intersections, twisting it this way and that, like an effortless banal scribble recorded  on the back wall of the crimson primordial retina. Wobbling ovals, obtuse oblongs, and flattened figures of 8, delineate fanciful heads with gaping mouths, the armatures of wire totems fashioned under lockdown. Drawing with fine wire is another journey towards an unconscious figuration by a process of chance. One is quite literally, reminded of Paul Klee’s dictum: taking the line for a walk.  Some resemble a tangled mass of binding, a scrotal forest teeming with microbial impostors, an infantile desire to amass. The introduction of red, green, blue, and purple, is similar to the use of crayons in drawing, except this ‘drawing’ takes place in physical space, like an orchestra conductor waving all those surging, invisible notes, into the imaginary ether. Where do all the notes go to?

The impetus for creating wire sculptures derives from painting and collage.  Totemic figures inhabit space, something akin to fetishes, and are aesthetically adorned with found bottle tops, bits of coloured glass, celluloid buttons and aluminium pieces. They also function as shadow totems when illuminated with a powerful flashlight or a profusion of  combined colour beams. The effect is prismatic and mesmerising, as all manner of hues merge and strobe to form the most stunning shadow play on surrounding white walls. In this respect, the wire sculptures utilise principles of urban recycling with optical invention and become phantasmagoria in the minds’ eye.

Doorstep Vendor

One night my doorbell rang. Swaying unsteadily at the foot of the steps was a man breathing a bellyful of sour intoxicating fumes into my face. He presented me with a child’s colouring book, rather the worse for wear, scuffed and tattered, blackened with grease from hands and dribbles of booze. Some of the outline drawings in the book had been chaotically coloured in a faltering, indecisive manner. A few pages had been ripped out, leaving torn stubs of paper as evidence of dissatisfaction. The man explained to me that he needed money urgently and asked me if I wished to buy one of his ‘pictures’. I said that I regretted I could not, as I do not keep cash in the house, but I wished him well with his foray into art. He cheerfully accepted this and crossed the street to unsteadily try another doorbell with renewed zeal.

Mr Moustache Extravaganza

Thei may be called legges of clowtes, as childre make popettis for to play with whil thei be yong.

– The Pilgrimage of the Soul, British Library MS Egerton 615, 1413.

Once upon a time, I acquired a small wooden figurine that I was told came from an Incan  grave in Peru. With its large, baroque extravaganza of a moustache, it is said to represent one of the conquistadors and dates to around 1532-1572. The object has survived remarkably well for 500 years and has a wide crack running through its torso, which could be a wound inflicted by a previous owner in some sympathetic magic ritual involving a malevolent spell and incantation.  On reflection, I wonder if this was a representation of the incoming Spanish invaders carved by an Incan? In our time, there are no other known comparisons of wooden conquistador dolls to be found, so the mystery remains unsolved.

In a copy of the  seminal 1928 book, Children’s Toys of Bygone Days, Karl Grober includes various plates of post medieval toy dolls. I present a few here for comparison and conjecture that the effigy was once a child’s plaything.

Nuremburg Damsel and her crumbling chorus of cohorts:

Originally published in Toys of Bygone Days, Grober, 1928. Plate:

Pewter (tin alloy) profane badges were manufactured in the German speaking low countries during medieval times. People wore them pinned on hats and cloaks as symbols of ribald humour, in an era when carnivals included overt sexual exhibitionism (exposing genitalia for shock value) lewd and bawdy jokes, poems, rhymes and stories, as part of the standard repertoire. They may have been purchased during carnivals as ornaments of outrage, souvenirs of sexual deviation, and expressions of defiance against the oppressive church and state (which had its own jiggery pokery going on behind the ivy clad cloisters). In this example, which has survived remarkably well, a roaming phallus in stockinged  legs pushes a wheelbarrow transporting much smaller baby penises. Whilst the exact meaning of this badge is now lost to us, we can surmise that it symbolizes male virility and sexual prowess. The wearer of  this brooch wished to be seen as sexually active and robust.

The Damsel’s Dream: As recorded with a needle on vellum disc

Nuremburg damsel with wreathed earphones, braided hair, what do you hear?   Interdimensional crash helmet, full of mistletoe vistas and woebegone fanciful critters. Call them creatures, with their bobbing mandibles busy at the pulley and spinney. Unexpurgated trickle of the bistre tideline, alongside the gap toothed chicanery of the Bartmann flask, a cobalt blue speckled Bellarmine, spouts counter hexes against witchery inked on the blocks.  Widdershins: lore of the wodwose. Thrice round the rondule we dance.

Hymn to the dark. Having lived in the mud for 500 or more summers, we now inhabit the sequestered corner of a gallery, inside a sterile, temperature controlled vitrine, along with our amputee companions. With only the most imperceptible of bugs for company, we make conversation through eyes that peer at and into us. Palpable missives clawed in bug death powder, hieroglyphs from the hinterland, sprinkled round our slow motion granular decomposition. Strange news of the eye idol clan whispered from afar.

The liquid gaze of strangers: poring over my countenance for a nanosecond, captures a likeness on some infernal contraption, then  saunters over to the next exhibit/prisoner and awaits a makeshift brain transplant. Graffiti of the borrowed hollow, knotted in hourly phases of the bedraggled figure 8. In cracks between dimensions, our chittering and chattering splinters into an epiphany of expansion and contraction. Use of masks and wigs – scree from frozen hair rolls into the cracks. Is this the Fraternity of the imbecile?

Eat me uncooked as I am. Recompense the gleeman. Unbridled momentum is the loudmouth. Tell me his name. Sallies forth from the gut, to pilfer and plunge in an unscene underbelly. Now I swallow black. Something adorns the table. A manikin made from animal bones. Driven ghostwards in the dream, I am not talking along the bloodwire but it dreams all this through me. Loopholes in a rotting mappa mundi. We are envoys from nobody’s nocturne. All the time, the oculus, the quintessence of a connoisseur, is also a purveyor of shite and tat. Pleas of the dead are scraped on a tally stick, plumbing the silt of the dredge, from whence we came and where we must all surely return.

Living Bird Dolls

From the same book, a curious illustration entitled, Figures made to move by means of living birds. During the 16^th and 17^th centuries captured wild birds were dressed in dolls clothes and outfits, so as to appear real as they wriggled and writhed in the hands of their juvenile captors.

Black Slug, Full Stop.

A large black slug glides along its own slime superhighway, over cracks in the paving stones,  round tufts of grass inexorably onwards, towards the kerb’s edge. Coiling inwards in a spasm it forms a perfect full stop. Here, at the precipice we devise a recipe for the future, as yet undigested. Shall we carry on a bit further or stay put? When the creative dynamo of the imagination is running on empty what can possibly follow?

London UK, April-October 2020.

Notes:

The  beautiful photograph of the pewter profane badge was taken by the wonderful London based photographer, Hannah Smiles.

I do not provide a glossary for unusual words. Strangeness is to be cherished.

Nor do I provide a bibliography as I abhor academic essay structures.

Information filters to the curious.

This article has been written in fits and starts throughout the year. Many of the truths are abject lies embellished with a modicum of the truth.

the moist dead
crystallize
porous skulls of infants
in slow motion
their shadows sucked
into dark holes

Over time, I have interacted with objects that are so mysterious and enchanting that one cannot quite articulate their innate fascination, which is frequently spellbinding. These objects are ancient and at the same time appear so contemporary, as to be timeless. As a lifelong collector, coming from a lineage of seasoned, obsessive collectors, I am mesmerised by the cult of the object as a supernatural icon. Here I focus on a few of my favourite objects.

Little Mannie

Who and what is Little Mannie? The story starts in the early 1970s and centres round a collection of ancient stone heads, found in West Yorkshire and catalogued by Sidney Jackson, the keeper at Cartwright Hall Museum, Bradford. His  1973 booklet ‘Celtic and Other Stone Heads’ inspired me to reimagine the enigma of archaic heads.

We are lured into their dark history by their inherent grotesqueness, hideous expression, and weird mien. Jackson’s pamphlet of  oddities, with its  green dayglow cover, has continued to inflame my curiosity for 25 years. Take Old Harry for example, a monstrous stone head with bulbous eyes and chipped fangs, who appears to have had cranial surgery performed by a ham fisted stone mason. Like Old Nick and his other namesakes, this ogre  arouses a sense of disquiet by virtue of its very ugliness. As we are enamoured by notions of beauty, we are also drawn to the disfigured. In medieval times, something horrid was  called ‘grimlich’ nowadays we call it  grim. Little Mannie was  referred to as a God Dolly and brought happenstance calamity to the lives of people who came into direct contact with it, by a series of circumstantial domestic accidents and tribulations. Much of the lore associated with jinxed items may be the by-product of an inflated neurotic superstition, exaggerated by the tabloid media for spurious entertainment value. Just because something has an unsettling aspect does not mean that it is necessarily imbued with evil. We invent a scary story. We frame the object within this context. It suits our need for spinning an enduring fantasy.

Little Mannie was initially (wrongly) considered to be an ancient Celtic figurine by the ‘renowned’ scholar and sometime psychic, Dr Anne Ross.  With its huge nose, flaring nostrils, and slit eyes it could fall into any camp of misattribution. However, after further  expert examination and comparison, the object was determined to be an African fetish linked to the practice of black magic. When we intuit that a power object has been employed in some clandestine witchery, we automatically associate it with psychological unrest, as referenced by  the plethora of horror films which fixate on the primitive as  source material for the nefarious (The Witches, Hammer Films 1966, being a good example of this phenomenon).

Dream Fragment (18.02.20)

I steadily climb a green hill covered in stones and discover a group of  chanting pilgrims walking barefoot to the summit, their faces hidden by cowls. On the way up, I encounter a  weathered placard of embroidered bearded faces, stitched in a furious tangle, that resembles a riot of  mossy heads all eating one another. Rain has saturated the purple fibres.  They hang heavily, like putrescent masks. I am given a crudely photocopied book, much thumbed, cracked, and dirty. The indistinct photos show vagabond female teenagers in the 19^th century carrying fake infants made from reconfigured doll parts with ill fitting, matted, wigs. At the top of the hill there is a worn Sheela-na-gig carving exposing its vulva with a manic grin. Upon a brick and flint wall:  a curious stone idol with misshapen features beckons to me. I am told this is the protector. The guardian of the mound. In most towns and cities, gargoyles abound. Only a few of us can hear their rain schemes play out for insomniacs.

Heavy Head

Some years ago, I chanced upon a heavy stone head, about the size of a clenched fist, for sale in a bric-a-brac shop. The crudity of the carving made me question if it was a piece of folk or tribal art. The weight is considerable, especially when held for more than a few moments. Its colour is a very dark, chestnut brown. The texture is extremely hard, which might explain why the features are so simplistically gouged. Its form reminds me of the strange sentinels that inhabit tree trunks, bridges, walls, doorways, lintels, wells, and fireplace surrounds – liminal characters that leer at us through centuries of shifting belief systems. At first glance, the head resembles an inflated fungus, or wrinkled pig’s bladder, striated with delicate folds and creases.  On the basis of its novelty value and for the sake of speculation I acquired the head, which has an indescribable, untutored semblance. However, I learned little from the shop owner, who  reading my thoughts, suggested, ‘it could be an ancestor figure’. That clinched the deal.

Since purchasing the object, it has variously served as a door stop, paperweight, and curio.  At one stage, it was arranged on a bookshelf; later it relocated downstairs where it became lost for a while amongst a profusion of packages. I retrieved it by providence and took it upstairs, where it resided on a side table. During the filming of a documentary, I was asked to sit and talk on camera with the object in frame. Each time this sequence was filmed, it came out completely blank, despite new batteries being inserted into the camera consecutively. After some consternation, the director believed the head to be hexed. He was convinced that it had been previously worshipped in magic rituals and that it was charged with supernatural energy which blocked any filming of it. The head has recently been moved to the  kitchen table where it oversees eating. Things have quietened down. There have been no more extraordinary experiences to relate. For the time being it slumbers.

Two Neolithic Heads from Vinca

In 2010 I acquired two small terracotta heads from an antiquities dealer. They have the angular stylization typical of Neolithic heads from  the Vinca Culture near Belgrade, in Serbia. One has the suggestion of an owl or bird goddess where superficial damage reveals an eye wound – an enucleation? Perhaps, it bled tears from those sightless eyes? Its surface is pitted and under magnification resembles that of a horned toad.   The other head is alien looking, insofar that it is oval with huge almond shaped eyes and it has three holes on the crown – evidence of trepanning? Were these holes inserted to permit  a string to pass through them, so that the figurine could be worn as a magical amulet?  It would not look out of place in one of Picasso’s  images from 1907, when he was experimenting with cubist distortion under the spell of Congolese masks and statues in his Parisian studio. Both heads sit snugly in a padded box and have been used as power objects for their iconic qualities in some of my live performances. They have travelled in my coat pocket to Germany, Poland, and other now forgotten locations.

It was during a very cold snap in January 2011, that I was invited to perform at the Catalyst Gallery in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The space was once a glove and handkerchief factory opened in 1845, and its workforce comprised of young children susceptible to fatality caused by machine injury. With these facts in mind, I decided to take the heads with me and invoke them on a specially lit table. Working in such a cold temperature meant that I had to wear several layers of clothing to keep warm throughout the  day. The gallery hired an industrial heater until the fuel ran out, afterwards it rapidly cooled to freezing point and water froze in my paint pots overnight. Whilst painting an image on a 10m sheet of paper my fingers turned numb and I frequently had to rub my hands to get the circulation moving.  During the confusion caused by extreme coldness (the performance was 7.5 hours long) I somehow misplaced the Neolithic heads. At first, this led to frantic searches of crumpled boxes stored underneath tables. Finally, a highly comprehensive going over of the entire site yielded no return and I reluctantly came to think that the heads had been lost, or worse still, stolen. With an increasing sense of disappointment, I tried to backtrack on all the possible situations in which the heads might have been exposed. After much rumination, my attention was drawn to a small black holdall bag, the kind that normally holds just a few notebooks and pens. There at the bottom of the bag, inside a zipped up side pocket, was the small red box containing the heads. They had never been displayed publically and by a sense of disorientation brought about by fatigue, my memory was tricked into thinking that I had taken them out.

Back to Bed:  a short and comical history of some ornamental pigs ‘Carcassonne Style’

I wish to share an amusing vignette with you, that touches upon the avant garde and the extent of people’s willingness to enter the zeitgeist. During a particularly damp Spring, I arranged to meet my art teacher, who I had not seen for almost 40 years. Our rendezvous was pre-empted by numerous online exchanges that bordered on the surreal, befitting the jovial nature of communications between a former mentor and savant.

Arriving in the city of Carcassonne, I was offered the archetypal artist’s garret for the duration. Complete with leaking bathroom pipes that sprayed water in all directions from tiny punctures, the trademark squalor associated with a semi-derelict building on the verge of collapse, complimented the setting.  I was told the place was owned by a mercurial gallery owner who resided on  the other side of the street, who was incapable of selling the property, as a chain of prospective buyers kept pulling out at the last minute leaving him in what is commonly known as the lurch. My home for a few days   served as a suite of grubby, heavily curtained rooms, dark and oppressively full of obsolete items of unattractive, damaged furniture, covered in a fine layer of grey dust, burnt, blackened, cooking pots and pans, (of the cannibal cuisine variety?) broken, immovable doors, mouldering  rolled carpets, the lair of  long expired, now skeletal vermin.

From this house of horrors, I discovered a strange U shaped day bed and set to work, placing a snarling stuffed boar’s head at the foot of this little chaise, to keep me company during the long night, punctuated by the Gallic gurgling and belching of overflowing drainpipes. Having emptied a trash can of paint stained tissues over the bed, I retrieved a bird cage filled with oblong stones, and some sanguine plastic grapes, a few old Chianti bottles and a cracked vase, from which I fashioned an artist’s still life motif. To my surprise, I also found a number of chalk ware ornamental pigs (some of them gravy or sauce boats) which I decorated with pink tempera stripes and a form of enlarged lilac pointillism that so epitomises French impressionist painting. I placed these miniature animals around the bed, in a silent coterie, as if they were talismans placed before the shrine to the great god of detritus. Thus, the scene was set, and all I needed to do was to paint a black and white backdrop. I was ushered away to meet the art dealer, presiding over an exhibition of boring paintings that had failed to sell a single item. He ordered his dolorous gallery assistant to source a roll of Japanese paper and with much self- aggrandisement,  generously donated a sheet to my project. The paper was slightly yellowed at the edges which afforded it a vintage feeling fitting with the installation I had assembled from rubbish. Soon, I donned my grottesco mask and got into bed, mindful of creeping bugs and tickling fleas, my art tutor whirling paper birds on wires over my head, while a zealous young photographer took picture after picture of the shadow play on the surrounding walls in a flickering rapture of shimmering narratives.

However,  this harmony was short lived and interrupted by the dramatic arrival of the art dealer,  hot on our heels from his boutique of bogus art brut, he wanted to see what was ‘going on’. He was furious that the china pigs had been painted and stated, ‘eet eez not my collection!’’. Soon, I found myself elbow deep in soapy water, in what can only be described as a genuine kitchen sink drama, rubbing the objects clean in an act of ribald penance, having been reprimanded for being too experimental for  my own good. Unfortunately, this soggy act of contrition was not enough to appease the dealer, who having gone into a blue funk over some pink pigs, decided to throw me out on the street, to demonstrate his authority in the face of such heinous sacrilege. Before leaving, I noticed a tangle of boar’s head bristles clogging up the sink hole: souvenirs of memorable antics.  Needless to say, we created hundreds of amazing colour photographs from the performance and an excellent short film, which was screened at the 58th Venice Biennale in June 2019.

Bellarmines

Two shards of bellarmine witch bottles came into my possession via a circuitous route. Originally, they were plucked from the slime of the Thames foreshore by a friend of mine, and covetously prized in a locked plan chest for many years. I only  glimpsed them once, and tentatively asked permission to draw them,  to be met with a blunt and glaring rebuttal, ‘No. I need them for my own work.’ Needless to say, they remained under lock and key and were never used.  As the years crept by, my friend eventually lost touch, moved 200 miles away, discovered the  ravages of alcoholic oblivion, and  very slowly withered away to  become a speck of dust in a plastic urn. After her tragic demise, the hoarded spoils of years spent foraging for finds were soon up for grabs, and I was invited by a mutual friend to inspect the cases of archaeological artefacts, to select my memento. Sure enough, there amongst this pile of shattered trophies, were the two smooth Bellarmine fragments, washed for 400 years by the tumbling action of the churning tides.

In order to write about the grotesque heads incised on the Bellarmine jar neck one must inhabit many other heads, both actual and fantastic, from those found at the source of the river Seine, to the phantasmagorical mannerist paintings of Arcimboldo. By placing one’s mind set in the cavity of another ancient head, a whole mythos of suggestibility begins to gestate and stir beneath the skin.

These Bellarmine fragments took over 20 years to finally enter my collection. During that time, they occupied my dreams and formed the basis of a  strange new pictorial language that I now employ in my paintings and collages. One shard is merely the eye of a Bellarmine, with its startling zigzag eyebrows, starburst barbs, spikes that puncture the ribbed brow. The other is glazed and depicts the worn features of another eye, squashed nose, and cheekbone. On closer inspection, a miniscule pink dust mite can be seen traversing the rim in a speedy faltering motion, stopping here and there for a rest on its meandering transit, which seems to mimic the undulating course of the river. There must be billions of dust mites present in my collection – microscopic custodians of the grimace! A modern counterpart for the Bellarmine face could be the emoji with the not so amused face, its lips curled in spiteful disdain.

If Bellarmines could speak, or communicate with one another, how might they sound? Would their voices burble of the riverbank and its swirling currents filled with accidental and deliberate drownings, the lost and found playthings of yesteryear, and the popping of muddy mouths spewing out their untold stories? Who would capture these vomited histories?

Notes

The publications I refer to in this article are:

The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic, Ralph Merrifield, 1987.

Celtic and Other Stone Heads, Sidney Jackson, 1973.

Bellarmine jars are globular shaped stoneware flasks dating principally from the 16^th and 17^th centuries, named after Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who attempted to impose  strict prohibition on the imbibing of alcohol.  The German ceramic artists who manufactured these onion shaped beer bottles delighted in the cruel sport of depicting his face in caricature on every single bottle neck. Thus, we see multiple examples of the growling, bearded visage of the Bellarmine, which also brings to mind the fanciful wild man of Teutonic forest lore.

Witch Bottles were extensively employed by many during the period as counter hexes against witches. Bellarmines have been found to contain  finger nail parings, bent iron nails, brass pins, cloth hearts, urine, and human hair. The bottles were sealed and usually buried under the doorstep of houses, or in the voids between walls, to ward off witches.