Bookwork - Divide (The Territorial Imperative)

Divide (The Territorial Imperative) |  2008
Guillotined book, bricks and digital print

This work was made for a group show in Exeter Central Library centred on an artists’ walk around Exeter Quay and a nearby trading estate. “A walk – like a narrative – unfolds though time. Yet its flow may be interrupted: a wall blocks the view, a high fence bars the route…”

The book was The Territorial Imperative by Robert Ardrey and it was cut in half for me by a local printer. We both had a telling moment of doubt before committing the act.

Bookwork - A Guidebook of Supposed Lies

A Guidebook of Supposed Lies | 2004 | Found book with additions

A Guidebook of Supposed Lies is part of an ongoing investigation into marginalia and readers’ interventions in library books (from coffee stains to scholarly arguments). A found copy of Francis Chichester's Gipsy Moth Circles the World was given a new dust jacket, library date stamp sticker, catalogue number, bar code and other additions. In an attempt at collaborative authorship, it was then liberated into the Plymouth University Library with the instruction that  “This book is to be improved on or before the date stamped below…”

The book's new title is drawn from The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and the dust jacket contains a quote from the same book: “When he discovered the truth to what had seemed a lie, he brought out his glue pot and pasted in a map or news clipping or used a blank space in the book to sketch men in skirts and faded unknown animals alongside them.” 

Bookwork - Threads (Crusoe Revisited)

Threads (Crusoe Revisited) | 2007 | Found book, thread

I'm reviewing some of my old bookworks in preparation for making a proposal or two. This piece was based on a found copy of Robinson Crusoe and was shown as part of 'Bibliomania', Holden Gallery, Manchester in 2007.

Robinson Crusoe was a story remembered from my childhood, which I revisited after a chance encounter with a copy of the novel in a charity shop;  the reunion was rather less cosy than I'd hoped.

The stitching I inserted throughout this book both embodies the narrative thread and destroys it. It was made with thoughts of Roland Barthes’ ‘writerly’ texts where the thread is a kind of ‘deliberate static’ that interferes with the possibility of losing oneself in the book.

Why all the bananas?

Banana Island aka Cranana | Cress grown on canvas | 2012

My sudden obsession with making images of bananas stems from a project I'm researching called Foreign Soil. Carried out in partnership with OrganicArts and West Town Farm, and in consultation with banana cultivation and climate-change experts, it's a proposal to grow edible dessert bananas outdoors in the UK. 

By suggesting that we impose this tropical alien on the traditional Devon countryside, I'm hoping to throw all sorts of issues into sharp relief, such as what it means to eat locally produced food and the implications of peak oil and other disruptions to global trade.

Twenty-eight drawings later

I've been nominated for the Aye-Aye Books/28 Drawings Later Innovation Prize.