Friday, 20 January 2012
Truth
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
Saturday, 17 December 2011
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Sweep
Roll in, slide out, uncoil and deepen
Arrive departed, both endless and finite.
Full head and empty mind
spinning relentlessly.
Never remembered again.
Thursday, 3 November 2011
Distance and Time
Sunday, 23 October 2011
Sunday, 2 October 2011
Monday, 19 September 2011
Waterwait
Sunday, 4 September 2011
Saturday, 27 August 2011
Tuesday, 16 August 2011
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.
Sunday, 14 August 2011
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.
Thursday, 4 August 2011
Letting It Out and Letting It In

Sunday, 31 July 2011
Proof

Thursday, 28 July 2011
To Order the Chaos
Monday, 18 July 2011
To Finish What Was Started

Friday, 1 July 2011
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.
Saturday, 25 June 2011
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
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.
Sunday, 19 June 2011
Sometimes Words Are All I Have....
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
The Challenge of Clothing

Tuesday, 7 June 2011
Tuesday, 31 May 2011
How a Tin of Crayons Changed the World...

Saturday, 28 May 2011
skin begins...
Wednesday, 25 May 2011
So much time spent...
Sunday, 22 May 2011
wrestling with the air














