Narrative Codes is part of an ongoing series of works examining unarticulated trauma through codes. French theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes suggested that all stories contain combinations of five narrative patterns that create suspense, ask unanswered questions and anticipate a resolution. I am currently using codes – narrative codes and the device of QR codes – to examine autobiographical events. The ability of QR codes to hold narrative has interested me for a long time. As a former cryptographic programmer and as an artist, I find their form and format both elegant and intriguing. This piece brings together my interests in language, relief printing, artist books, coding and decoding meanings together in a simple codex structure that invites the viewer to create story objects (cubes) that can be reconfigured to change and rearrange the narrative, acting as a proxy for my own attempts to overcome history.
Finalist in the Libris Artist Book Awards, Mackay, 2022 and the Northern Beaches Libraries Artist Book Awards, Manly, 2023. Acquired by the State Library of NSW, 2022.
The book consists of six pages (including the title page), with five ‘nets’ or patterns for making cubes. Each cube consists of six QR codes. In theory, the book’s owner could create their own cubes by cutting and folding along the pattern lines, although I have printed three cubes to go with each complete physical copy of the book.
‘Lossed’ is an alternate spelling and carries overtones of the retention (or not) of image data in photographic reproductions due to the use of lossy or lossless algorithms. This book is a seven-layer reduction relief print of an image of my parents, taken on their wedding day.
Exhibited at the IMPACT multi-disciplinary printmaking conference at the University of the West of England, September 2022 as part of “Lossed: BookArtObject 6”. Acquired by the State Library of NSW.
The structure of the book is a double accordion fold, made of three sheets of paper. The only ‘whole’ sheet is the final page in the book but the only ‘whole’ image is on the first page, where all seven layers of the print depict my parents… divided by the pleated paper. The structure of the book is a metaphor for the differences and contradictions of their lives together.
As the pages of the accordions are turned back, the image loses one layer…
This gallery contains images of work completed during the initial COVID-19 pandemic, from 2020 - 2021. More details about each piece are included against the individual works.
7-layer reduction print, 21 x 26cm, Derivan waterbased relief inks on Fabriano Tiepolo 220gsm paper.
Something that has struck me as the world has unravelled this year is the distance and separation between people that we have never seen before, with its background in fear and unknowing. This creates a paradox for healthcare workers as they can no longer ‘break down barriers’ between medical staff and patients, but instead follow strict procedures to gown up, protecting themselves from the illness they treat. The image captures the unknowing as a young woman puts on her mask and gown before going into theatre. The reduction technique in which layers are progressively removed and reprinted echoes the layers of protective clothing that is put on and stripped off in an effort to contain the COVID-19 virus.
The first of a series of collagraph prints made on the reverse of medicine packets with the idea that both sides of the print relate to nursing.
Cardboard plate with tissue paper, PVA glue and shellac, image size variable. Printed using Charbonnel ink on Somerset Satin 250gsm paper.
8-layer reduction lino print, edition of 12 with 2 artist proofs, 26 x 20cm. Aqua waterbased relief prints on Fabriano Tiepolo 220gsm paper.
The flanges glisten in a plastic box, faintly green. Tired red letters promise miracles, but do they deliver? In a year that has challenged certainty, did the absent flange save a life? Peeling away layers of lino to reveal the image mimics peeling away our layered lives as much as it echoes the layers of protective clothing, masks and gloves used by the lifesavers.
The second in a series of collagraph prints made on the reverse of medicine packets with the idea that both sides of the print relate to nursing.
Cardboard plate with tissue paper, PVA glue and shellac, image size variable. Printed using Charbonnel ink on Somerset Satin 250gsm paper.
After printing one clean print per packet, I reassembled them inside-out as three-dimensional ‘drawings’.
Graphite, Indian ink, gouache, pigment pen on gesso on board
Finalist: STILL National Still Life Awards, 2019
The first of a series of collagraph prints made on the reverse of medicine packets with the idea that both sides of the print relate to nursing.
Cardboard plate with tissue paper, PVA glue and shellac, image size variable. Printed using Charbonnel ink on Somerset Satin 250gsm paper.
I shared a flat in London with a lovely man, with whom I also worked. He was talented, interesting, intelligent, and he killed himself one summer evening, locking himself into the garage we shared, and to which I had the only other key. It broke my heart. For years and years I was so angry with him: if he cared about me, how could he die in a way that meant only I could find him? And yet, after a year of thinking about him and remembering all the good times we had together, I have changed my mind: I think he trusted me.
Acquired by the State Library of NSW.
In 2009 I co-founded BookArtObject with Caren Florance from www.ampersandduck.com. BookArtObject is an international collective of artists producing limited editions of artist books in response to text.
The collective has a website and Flickr stream which you can access here: http://bookartobject.blogspot.com/ and https://www.flickr.com/photos/bookartobject/.
This gallery contains images of my contributions to the collective’s five projects.
Edition One (2011) responded to Australian poet Rosemary Dobson’s 1986 poem Learning Absence
Edition Two (2011) responded to New Zealand artist and poet Claire Beynon’s 2007 poem Paper Wrestling
Edition Three (2012) responded to British novelist Jeanette Winterson’s 1994 novel, Art & Lies
Edition Four (2013 - 2014) responded to British artist Sarah Bodman’s 2010 work, An Exercise for Kurt Johannessen
Edition Five (2019) responded to Australian poet John Bennett’s 2018 suite of poems, Overwintering
Acquired by the State Library of NSW.
Acquired by the State Library of NSW.
Flux was a body of work made for a group show with three other artists in 2017. Again, my primary interest was the plight of Afghan refugees. Paintings on board, slate and canvas dealt with the weather encountered during long, slow voyages in small, dangerous, overcrowded boats.
Acrylic and oil paint, graphite, ink on maps on board
Acrylic and oil paint, graphite on canvas
Bitumen, acrylic paint, graphite, indian ink, oil stick, oil pastel on board
Bitumen, acrylic paint, graphite, indian ink, oil stick, oil pastel on board
Bitumen, acrylic paint, graphite, indian ink, oil stick, oil pastel on board
Bitumen, acrylic paint, graphite, indian ink, oil stick, oil pastel on board
Acrylic paint, gloss medium, graphite, ink on slate
I love Australian seed pods! They are so different to the seed pods I was used to looking at in the UK. These seed pods are from an invasive tree, and they reminded me of both Viking long boats and Arab dhows - the boats of two cultures with traditions of sea faring and warfare. In the ‘othering’ of Arabia and the Middle East, we forget the suffering of their people. I found a passage in the saga Beowulf about the wailing of mothers whose sons have died in battle, and I cut out those verses on the sails of a flotilla of boats, translating the text into Arabic.
The majority of Australians are, or their forebears were, migrants and yet as a country we treat would-be migrants and refugees appallingly. I would love to visit Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria and will probably never be able to do so, and meanwhile, their citizens often attempt to come to Australia. Drift Tide is a body of work about taking a boat from Asia to Australia. Much of the work is on slates, brought with me from the UK to Australia from the roof of my former home in Bristol. As a roofing material they provide shelter, as a matrix for printmaking they provide a surface for screen printing, engraving and gilding. The background image is a sea scape, printed in a translucent wash over all of the slates in a single image. Over the sea scape are verses from a Hazara poem, Song of the Reed, engraved into the slates. Above the poem floats the constellations you would see if you stood in Kabul and looked towards Australia in the northern summer, the stars navigating refugees towards what they hope will become ‘home’.
Speaking in Tongues is a body of work that came out of reading Professor Nicholas Evan’s book, ‘Dying Words’. Evans disputes Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar, suggesting instead that babies listen to rhythm and frequency of the language into which they are born. I am interested in the idea that many cultures have a foundation myth about the dispersal of humans around the globe, so that they no longer speak one language and can no longer understand each other. The Judaeo-Christian story is the Tower of Babel, so I built towers, carving the Biblical words from Genesis 11, 1-9 in different languages. In doing so, the repetitive action of hand cutting different scripts in languages that I don’t speak helped me understand something about their grammar and structure.
Hand cut Canson pastel paper
Hand cut Canson pastel paper
This gallery contains images of earlier work.
My contribution to the Al Mutanabbi Street project was a folded book representing pomegranate seeds sprouting from the ancient pavement of Baghdad. In March 2007 a suicide car bomb destroyed the street killing thirty people and wrecking the cultural heart of the city. In Persian mythology the pomegranate is a symbol of courage and hope.
Screen print, engraving and gilding on slates. Exhibited at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery, August 2011
Tim Moseley ran the Codex residencies at Southern Cross University in Lismore, and I was invited to participate in 2008 and 2010.
Codex 4 engaged with Australia’s approach to refugees by making a series of paper balloon lanterns - one for each of the refugee holding centres at that time - which folded down into boats and books. The balloons and associated prints were displayed at Tweed Regional Gallery in 2008.
Gores for the balloons being screen printed ready for assembly
The balloons folded down into boats, mirroring refugee boats
The theme of this Codex residency was ‘Resistance’ - and we resisted! A series of pulp-printed and screen printed pages was bound into several artist books, of irregular dimensions. I worked with JP Willis on two books in accordion format, which were bound so that they could not open…
I created an artist book in the form of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, UK, from where I moved to Australia in 2006. The ‘covers’ of the book are the bridge pillars, made from cardboard and fishing weights. The suspension bridge is hand cut text on clear plastic, taken from Walt Whitman’s poem A noiseless, patient spider, which describes how spiderlings are blown from where they hatch to a site by chance, mirroring my own process of dislocation.
Finalists: Libris Artist Book Awards, 2013. Acquired by Southern Cross University.
The text of the poem can only be read by shining a light through the plastic, ‘writing’ the text in shadow, below.
On this page are a few oldies from my very early days learning printmaking - and one piece of really ancient history!
I love reflections and took a photograph of the golden finial of an old pub roof reflected in the modern windows of the court building on Elizabeth Street, on my first visit to Australia in 1999. The photograph formed the basis of this 4-screen screenprint.
One Christmas we drove back through the Lake District in the cold and sleet. This viscosity print reflects the muted hues of the mountainsides, with the cold, dark branches of winter trees against a pale sky.
I bought this album when it came out in 1982 - don’t judge me! - and later painted it for a university friend for his 21st birthday. It’s quite big - maybe A1 size - and I haven’t seen it in many years, but luckily I got a good photo. It’s painted in cheap acrylics on paper.
I did a whole series of etchings based on geological features, including this deep gorge. Hard and soft ground etching with aquatint and relief wiping.
I love making monotypes and often use them as sketches, to generate ideas or work out problems. This page is a collection of various prints that are not part of a serious body of work but are often just fun to make.
Charbonnel intaglio ink on Somerset Rough 280gsm paper
Trying to work out a multi-layer monotype with chine colle
Intaglio ink on Somerset paper
This was my second print, at the evening class I attended for five years at Queen’s Road School of Art in Bristol, UK. My first print was an additive monotype of my head, gazing at the polished copper and painting diluted ink onto the plate. I was hooked. The goose is a reductive monotype, made by wiping away areas of ink to let the white of the paper shine through.
