Texts

This is an ongoing series of articles and essays with subjects including art, performance and culture.

Albion is Defunct

Albion is Defunct: Some notes on marginal urban art

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 …

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Cultural Bric-a-Brac

Growth, like mould, depends on a certain microclimate in which to nurture a culture. When spores are wind-blown, they attach themselves to structures, developing into something of a cluster slightly out of reach. Try as we may to rub and …

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Anatomy of a pocket

This is the peculiar history of a pocket stuffed with all manner of oddities, a repository for uncategorised storage, concealment, and potential transformation.

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Stranger Familiars

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.

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False Starts

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.

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Supernatural Objects, Up Close and Personal

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.

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L st and foound

A large, battered looking envelope, thudded through my mail box and I noticed a San Francisco stamp mark. Opening it, I discovered 10 articles of bisque porcelain in the form of ‘Frozen Charlottes’, manufactured sometime between 1850-1920…

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Germination of an idol: Reflections on animistic totems in life and art

I would like to introduce you to a friend who lives in my bag. She’s actually a London stone, picked up off the street. You see, she looks a bit like a person and some think she resembles an owl. I take her everywhere with me. Visitor to the London Tribal Art Fair, 2017.

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magic edge

Birthday poem for Caroline Wiseman, 2017.

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Grottesco

In my lifelong hunt for the grottesco – I have travelled far and wide, both physically as a sort of acquisitive eyeball, or as a metaphysical tourist, and mentally, in my daydreams and reveries.

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