Truth

Truth is a rising river
And words sink like mouldering slums along its banks.
As each sorrow will unfold another sorrow
And each dream unfold another dream, unending
Let joy slip, finite as the light that drops
Into full and heaving water

Words blew open a chest
and words closed it again.
And, taking you further away, fastened it shut
though it bleeds still from time to time
in private moments.
And public ones.

Sweep

Lose, find, search and stare.
Roll in, slide out, uncoil and deepen
Arrive departed, both endless and finite.

Full head and empty mind
spinning relentlessly.
Never remembered again.

Distance and Time

It is because the world is so round that absence pounds so strong

It is because there is so much water dividing the land

sinking deep as the earth's own core

that our voices miss and fall, so much out of time

And when finally one does hear another, it is only the reflected echo, bounced off the impossible ocean

Distorted by the different skies that light our eyes

All that was built in language and written into our certainty

Has been flawed by distance and by time.

I fall.

The World (in my coffee)

new works

Terrain - 2011

Mixed media on Hahnemuhle paper

Transference - 2011

Mixed media on Hahnemuhle paper

Waterwait

Because the last trace to fade is always that of scent

it will linger, a disrupted afterburn of a different place

where time, measured in the meaning of another, bleeds across two worlds.

Not even an echo survives this vacuum

And the fabric that holds it tight,

a precious seam in a dusty mine

of memory made real, is gradually corrupted

As time between now and now is lengthened

by the waterwait of interfering distance

embrace this pale signature, lost so soon

The night will close around this forest like a dark hand around a soft and silent throat.

I love you and I don't know why.

For each cell that spins inside your body is identical to those that all crowd this tender space.

I love you and I don't know why.

Its your visage alone, flickering dark, then light, then dark again

With the thousand changing attitudes sweeping over and across, as distant as clouds

Unsettling my own fixedness, with cold wind and shadow.

I love you and I don't know why.

This narrow vacuum....

One definite gesture....

...against the specter of loneliness

and the pursuing beast of nothingness and nobody,

of which even your bright conviction shall not repel.

And as a single voice ignites a world whose foundations lie deep in the words of a drowned girl

and in which ideology is carved from a narrow corner of dissatisfaction

to be cultivated in some nightmare garden

You will observe, no more, the gap created in an absence,

That empty socket pining for a tooth

Making your rough return to a place you destroyed as a child

and devoted your life to its reconstruction.

At the centre of reason there is a tree that always flowers

...But its not a destination

Even if the stolen boat of your body, tagged and fallible, brings you close.

Acquaint yourself now with this fragile alliance of air and skin that you name existence

While shimmering interstices that thread wetly

And join one thing to another are dissolving

Understand that never again will you warm yourself by the sun's other face.

Letting It Out and Letting It In

I love city parks, that small stretch of "wild" in the middle of the civilised space. Though it is manicured, hedged and ordered it still allows for a little of the natural to seep into the domestic.

The park opens the door to something else, making available a refuge (as sunny lunchtime spent out of the office) as well as a savage and dangerous place (an ill advised shortcut home after dark).

And once nature takes root in the city like this, it infiltrates every corner and ledge. It will not be restrained and there is no controlling it. It has been let in.

Opening the door to this twin aspect of danger and refuge is a strong impulse in my work. I am letting out a little of the uncertain and the unmeasurable interior onto the demarcated and ordered surface of the world.

Proof

The first artist proofs of One Road In and One Road Out have arrived. They are printed on A2 (60 cm H x 40 cm W) Hahnemuhle photo rag.

The anxious hours spent adjusting and mixing colour and light levels have paid off and the printed images are as close a match to their digital parents as I could have hoped.

This has been my very first experience (outside of university) with digital imaging and printing processes and I have learnt a great deal from it. I love it!

To Order the Chaos

Of creative impulse. When those ten thousand ideas jostle and push around my mind, all crying as loudly as the next to be given a life, there is nothing I can do but open a clean page and let their words and images pour out.

Like all births, its messy and chaotic.

To Finish What Was Started

And to wrap up the first stage of a project that was like no other... following that one road in and out of myself and bringing back all that which I found there. Pleasant and not so pleasant.

Over the next few days it is a world of test sheets, artist proofs, TIFF's, JPEG's, CMYK, RGB and other printing-speak as I get the work editioned.

In the meantime, my website has been updated to provide a clearer picture of how the work comes together.

Dialogues of Skin and Self

Now it is time to paint yourself into the world

as that undefined space that is called self, or soul, or some such

will never quieten...

I began the One Road In and One Road Out project as an experiment in new ways to use the body in art. However, it quickly developed into a method of breaking through certain ideologies that had limited my art-making process to a bland formula of brush and canvas.

The images of One Road In and One Road Out are created by painting directly onto the body and documenting these “body paintings” with digital photography. Most of the work is undertaken alone and it is during the process of marking up skin and posing the body to ensure that the “painting” remain in focus that the art happens. This singular and private “performance” of a painted and struggling body is recorded in photographs that are then manipulated to emphasise the gesture of the work.

No escape from the discomforting body

...When flesh and blood no longer nourish

but fall as all flesh and blood does...

Just as our skin sits at that intersection between inside and outside, our self resides in the intersection of culture and nature. To navigate this confusing territory of identity, I investigate these intersections by creating a kind of synaesthesia between the imagined and the material experiences (the physical and the emotional scars) of the body. The paint I apply represents tidemarks and depicts the emotional residue left behind from the complicated experience of living.

Despite time spent applying and rubbing back paint and the work cropping and editing the photographs, it is the skin that truly dominates the project. It influences the process in so many different ways. Sometimes it is nothing more than the body's encasement and a (reasonably) stable surface on which to apply paint; it then reacts like the living tissue it is, reminding me of its role as facilitator of touch and each mark I make sensitises a complex surface of nerves, follicles, glands and scars; then it becomes a gateway, that porous membrane through which the world, despite our best efforts, passes in and out.

Only by painting directly onto the skin do I come to realise that the story of skin goes deeper than the surface which we see. With this complex medium, I need no theory to guide me. When I work like this there is nothing to say that has not been said, perfectly, a thousand times before.

Working directly upon the skin has been essential to stripping back any kind of art theory that would have otherwise waterlogged and killed the work. One Road In and One Road Out is my first approach to exploring things in an unlearned way. Though free from cultural hyperbole I continue to be fired up by the work of others that centres on issues of body and identity, such as Julia Kristeva's essays on abjection, Michele Serres' Five Senses, the tender and intimate photographs of Miru Kim and Jenny Saville's visceral paintings.

Carry the road on which you travel

Bound to it as you are

Across the doming surface of this world.

The paint Traces the wounds of the self and lays down a map of the body's existence and experience. Making a mark upon the body in this way is simultaneously an animal instinct, like marking out territory, and a cultural act where the body is decorated to remove it from its natural state.

The paint is smeared onto the skin. Cold and wet it runs into the cracks and wrinkles. Bright and dark liquid pools in the tiny pores and the multitude of scars, those miniature reminders of a rough and tumble childhood. I can feel the skin pinching into tight wrinkles as it dries. It cakes and I brush it off, leaving behind a stain I know will remain for a few days, adding another dimension to the story my skin tells the world.

Painting on the body's variegated form, not conceived or constructed for the specific purpose of art-making, could be likened to painting on the wall of a cave. There are dark and hidden areas, some parts will not allow paint to adhere to its surface. It is alternately concave, convex and always alive.

For this reason the paintings are abstracted, naturally distorted by the body's own ebb and flow and the gathering and dispersion of pigment. Many of the works look like a landscape seen from above, a satellite image of roads or rivers, like the natural and manmade paths that over time are cut across a country.

For the love of skin and all the marks it will bear for me.

Developed alongside the photographed images are a series of texts. The importance of words to One Road In and One Road Out has become apparent over the course of the project, not as supporting statements or dissertations, here the words are simply composed into short prose as the photographs are edited. There is a power in the interaction between words and images, a relationship that, in its simplest form, is represented by the illustrations in a book and highlights the storytelling aspect of skin itself.

By painting my story upon my skin and mapping out on its surface all that lies beneath, I am able to return to locations, both real and imagined, that are significant to myself. Pushing the boundaries of the body in art is how I know who I am and by literally painting myself into the world I can explore that place where self meets body.

Zero-Sum Game

No escape...

...from the discomforting body

bound to this earth

No reprieve from paying debts of a free heart and freer tongue.

When flesh and blood no longer nourish

but fall as all flesh and blood does

And the last remaining freedom form the stubborn impermanence of life

is your uninvented death.

Sometimes Words Are All I Have....

...because the image is so entirely complete that to re imagine it would diminish its original beauty.

The importance of text has become more apparent to me over the last few months. When I make an image, in any medium and for any purpose, words, composed in poetic phrase develop around the creation of the image. They always have done. Until recently, though, I always disregarded the text.

My imagery is often inspired wholly or in part by a poem, essay or story. There is something in the interdependency of words and images that appeals to me. A relationship that, in its simplest form, is represented by the illustrations in a book.

This marriage of text and image also occurs the other way round; when I see something that catches my attention and makes me look again, my mind begins to compose words in response to this visual experience.

I am now allowing the words and images to develop side by side, supportive of each other but not exclusively codependent and no longer torn up and hidden away.

The Challenge of Clothing

In the latest shoots for One Road In and One Road Out, I have been working with the clothed body.

I have always found clothes challenging as they can quite easily dominate an image and make the work look like a fashion spread. However, over the last few days I have managed to incorporate the clothes naturally with the body.

This is very exciting.

Getting the image right with clothes means I am no longer constrained by having to use nude models. I can push my work further and into very different directions.

Gathering the road

How a Tin of Crayons Changed the World...

...Well, changed the world for me.

One small tin of neocolor water soluble crayons (bought on special some years ago out of curiosity) a digital camera and skin, most often my own, have come together to construct One Road In and One Road Out.

It all springs from my sketch a day experiments of 2009/10 and has transformed the creative process of my work. Now, with these tools I am exploring the concept of using the body in art and, quite literally, painting myself into my work.

The next stage of One Road In and One Road Out, will involve painting myself into those places that hold a personal significance to me.

This is myself upon that one road, as I embed myself into both the physical and emotional spaces of this world.

skin begins...

...closing over an old cut

and pink, lumpy flesh gathers at this long winter's edges.

It is not an ending that the body heals

but damage inflicted from being there at all

Shake loose now and face north.

So much time spent...

...enduring that pounding chest

as frustration slathered like a wild thing and

impotent desire could not free itself and run.

Knowing the air is thinner outside than it is in,

though, there is some physical trickery that holds the flesh together.

Now it is time to paint yourself into the world

as that undefined space that is called self, or soul, or some such

will never quieten until the soot and ash are scraped off

against the pebbles of some waterless shore.

wrestling with the air

Constructing my body of work, One Road In and One Road Out, involves painting on bare skin and then photographing the painted skin.

Aside from those occasions where I have a model with me, the work is done alone in the studio. I am at once make up artist, model, photographer and post production artist.

I work in front of two mirrors, rigged to see the area of my body I am applying the paint to. Then, twisting and turning my body so that the painted skin is in focus I fight the limitations of my own limbs as I reach above and behind to adjust the lense. Trying to hold my body still and keep from shaking, as I shoot.

After three or four shots in one awkward pose I dart behind the camera to double check I am still in view and that the right areas are in focus. Contorted and holding, waiting for the click of the shutter, it feels like I am wrestling with the air itself.