Leafing through
the big ideas
there are glimpses of                   
                         things that 
                         set me on fire

Like separating the concertina sections in the hoover filter to release the compacted dust inside

Peering through gaps between books
like Matthew McConaughey

More dust
Lightyears

Poking fingers through 
Parting gaps
Slices of things, the Good Stuff

Friend, I’ll pull out sheets of paper and we’ll crouch on the floor to write;
I’ll lay down a line for you, a verse to pull us into the air, the sky full of birds.

Friend, look at this grass with me.
Tell me you don’t see multitudes.

Friend, we’ll walk through mud, and I’ll tell you about times when I thought I might die from loneliness.
I’ll tear a sheet of paper and give you half. I’ll fish out a crayon – it’s the one I like using the most.

Friend, can you feel the cold air tearing at your throat? It’s the most pleasurable kind of pain.
I sat on the ground, waiting for you. 

The rabbit’s mother has been eaten by a fox.
Friend, see these bones, spread out under the bush. The rain has washed them clean.

To wake up on the side of some unremarkable hill, amongst some damp vegetation, pick up a stone and roll it gently into the brook

To rustle quietly along a hedgerow, and stare across a bleak, misted valley towards a concealed horizon

To soak one hand on a mossy wall, and sprinkle droplets across a muddy track, mind absent and body lost

To be devoid of context, to have no personality, to be nothing close to human and yet as human as it gets

To be alone, backside pressed against the ground, to share warmth with no-one and welcome the cold and wet as it creeps around in the dark morning

To tense each muscle in turn, blink twelve times and twelve times more, look skyward and breathe in

To breathe out slowly. To swallow spit. To lift a foot and walk.

A song about pine needles

A cold wind blowing across a field

A road sign

Cramp in bed

Persistent sore throat

The turning of the seasons

Full-beam headlights on a park bench

A log, rotten on one side

Mushrooms the size of my hand

Breathing concrete dust

A new prescription

A massive earwig on the window

Slippers or walking boots

Geology of a magazine page

A pop-up card to celebrate the Devonian

A walk to collect sticks shorter than my arm

A map of the flattest parts of the UK

Sedimentology of a paragraph

A sprinkle of chalk on a crashmat

A poster about posters

A leaflet about unnecessary objects

A dead tree that needs bringing down

One of the best plays I ever read wasn’t a play, it was a manga series
“Fushigi Yuugi” – “The Mysterious Play”
A saga leaping between time periods, ancient and modern tied together
An epic journey of adolescence, magic, love and grief

My play is deconstructed, like ‘oops I dropped the lemon tart’.
Its parts are present but not prescriptively ordered
They sit next to one another, on top of each other, they’re in a constantly reordered list, and they float around each other in space.

The stage directions are collected together in one place rather than being dispersed amongst the dialogue
A list of commands and suggestions, rhythmically iterated with a sense of urgency.
Always In Italics

There is dialogue but it’s not between people
There are monologues and I speak them softly to myself, I play them into the ground
Conversations without words, unreciprocated one-way talking

A Play is a Site, a location where things can converge and collate
The layers can come together and get squeezed, compressed, and the things that leak out can be collected.
The way things are presented and the order in which they are seen can change depending on where and who and what is involved.

A play contains the visual, the oral, the auditory,
the musical, the philosophical, the kinetic, the textual,
the sculptural, the architectural, the fabricated, the human,
the adult, the child-like, the emotional, the spiritual,
the real, the imaginary, the passive, the active,
the spatial, the flattened, the collective, the individual

There are movements big and small, lights, and darkness too.
There are looks exchanged and feelings felt – on the stage, beside, behind, under and in front of it.

The stage is built on layers of time.

Notes on distant minerals

Notes on the stone in my pocket

Notes on the hollywood sign

A post-it about water on mars

A post-it about silty clay

A table of contents listing the composition of a core sample

A journal of urban walking

A novel about chalk

Thought-musings about surviving in the arctic

A note about the sky written on a pebble

An obituary written on a leaf

An obituary written in sticks on a beach

A love letter to a fossil

A manifesto felted into a scarf

A way of explaining stitched onto the back of a cardigan

I am dreaming of words as objects – a wall of letterforms to navigate around, to encounter and digest not as reading words on a page but as a lump of something to block my way, to lay my hands on and try to move. A tomb-raider-style stone push, an iron deadlift or a jenga-brick-pull-out. A poem laid out in an imaginary space, the imaginary floor rolled-out to accommodate a landscape of letters in an imaginary atmosphere. I’m jumping indiana-jones-style from character to character to make the words real. Stacking and sorting, a warehouse of production, each word accumulating volume and mass as letters are moved and combined. It makes me sweat. The words have weight, and I’m lifting each letter with back straight and knees bent. In and out of a squat, I bob up and down in a literary work-out, muscle fibres tearing, I’d better eat some eggs after this.

As I drag the final character into place, I look around and survey my arrangement. How long will I stay here? Is it finished? What am I actually trying to make? I have realised not all of these objects are english, or Roman, I should say. Some of them are letters and characters from other languages and alphabets, some familiar and some I’ve never seen before. I turn a couple over. I spin them round. I start to realise some aren’t even what I would call a letterform. They are simple shapes which seem to suggest a character or ‘glyph’ – they are on the edge of saying something with their form, but in their obscurity they don’t make a sound in my head. They also seem to have multiplied, and now the various piles stretch as far into the distance as I can see. Together, they make something close to language, but not language itself. I make a chair from a few of them. I sit down and lean back with my hands behind my head, my ankles crossed. “Yep”, I think. “This is what I wanted”.

This text was written in response to this image by Reba Mosley

A casserole dish nestles in the corner between the pub’s exterior wall and the lip of the pavement. Filled with yesterday’s rain, cigarette butts lie in and around it, as they were thrown by their owners and not all of them hit their target. The water is stained dark brown with burnt tobacco, and in its murky depths can also be seen some brown dead leaves. Fallen from nearby trees, they are scattered in a similar way to the cigarette butts, the only difference being that there was no intended place for these leaves to be contained, and those that landed in the pot are there simply by chance.

The materials which make up this image are combined in a way which betrays their position and relativity to one another, and to the people who are absent from the image but whose past presence is strongly implied. The stone wall of the pub is there because people need a place to meet each other and drink, especially when it’s raining. The casserole dish is there because people need a container for waste items, the used-up, surplus bits. And people need a wide-angle ashtray when they’re a few pints deep. The water is there because it rained, either last night or this morning (perhaps it’s still raining a bit now?). The leaves are there because it is Autumn. The cigarette butts are there because we still like smoking even though we know it’s bad for us.

The water in the pot is there because, just as water always does, it kept moving until something stopped it and contained it. It apparently came to the end of its journey from the sky, a portion collecting in this casserole dish and stagnating, discoloured and polluted. This portion of water contained in this pot signifies the end of a period of motion, a slowing-down of particles previously suspended at altitude and then hurled towards earth at speed.

The cigarette butts are also a marker for the end of a time. A full-stop at the end of a sentence, the dregs of a beer, the bell for last orders. The last drag on a cigarette tells us it’s time to go back inside. The fallen leaves tell us that Summer is over. Things are changing, slowing down, wrapping up, getting ready for something else. The cast iron casserole dish is serving a new function now. Its days of withstanding intense heat are over, and it has been retired to this cold, wet corner to serve as a sturdy, comforting reminder that all things get a second chance.

A Letter to Mum

There is a photo I have, a six-by-four gloss print of you on a hill somewhere in Wales, smiling with your hand on your hip. You’re smiling at me. This photo is physically the same as the day it was printed, but I can’t help feeling that your face has undergone some shift. I used to find comfort in it, but now it unsettles me. Somehow that smile has a weariness to it, a kind of sadness. I have carried on changing while this print has stayed the same, and in that process of change, I’ve become aware of things I couldn’t see before. I think this photo shows that you are (were) not ok. You are tired and in pain. Your death came as such a shock to us, but it shouldn’t have; all the signs were there, but even the doctors couldn’t read them.

For a long time I have allowed my tendency to minimise personal subject matter in my work to stop me from doing the work completely. The voice in my mind repeated, ‘Why should anyone care what YOU think? Why should anyone care what you’ve experienced?’ But in writing this text, I am acknowledging what I have come to know; the personal gives way to the universal.

The following year at school was the hardest of my life. In Year 12 I took a course in Geology as an ‘enrichment’ option, but this meant I would end up with almost no free periods in my timetable for a year. I was suppressing grief and trauma, refusing help, drowning in coursework, exhausted, lashing out at my teachers, but in the midst of this, my Geology lessons were providing a strange source of comfort. Although I had hated sciences, I didn’t mind these lessons because for me, Geology also spoke to me through the visual, the philosophical and the historical. There was a divine mystery in those patterns, those processes, the age and diversity of our planet’s foundations. There were rich images, tactile specimens and incomprehensible timescales. You can experience Geology on levels ranging from the microscopic to the universe-wide, and it now cannot help but influence the way I think about just about anything.


SOLID – A Letter to The Banded Iron Formation

The Great Oxygenation Event started in the Archaean Eon (around 2.6 billion years ago) with Cyanobacteria. A mass of blue-green organisms, multiplying in an atmosphere hitherto devoid of oxygen, using a new kind of energy production: photosynthesis. Chains of cells absorbing sunlight through the murky waters of the sea, vitalising, soft technology fizzing, suspended, light-feeding microscopic greenery to which we arguably owe our very existence.

It was while the supercontinents bumped against each other over millions of years, causing great seas and mountains to appear and disappear, that this blooming of life was occurring, and the right mix of minerals and nutrients tumbled into the oceans from gigantic swathes of eroding mountain range.

The landscape itself is an access-point to history. Often, probably unintentionally, we think of it as something we ‘look at’ or ‘go to’; I’m over here, and it’s over there. We are distanced and detached from it, and by extension, we are displaced from the past. Aldo Leopold was writing about cohesion between land and humans as an ethical necessity in the first half of the 20th century, introducing a ‘land ethic [to] change the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.’ Somewhat before his time, he had identified a need to counteract the human effects of industry on the landscape by actively tuning into its rhythms and inserting ourselves into its systems as a participant rather than an owner.

In my opinion, though, since he wrote this, our stewardship has taken on the opposite effect, especially in our small country with such a perceived density of people and therefore a sense of urgency about preserving ‘green spaces’. It once seemed to me to be a positive and wholly responsible enterprise, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered about how it might be problematic, in that it denotes care and attention on its face, but the subtext is still really about ownership.

Victoria Whitworth wrote a whole book about swimming in the sea, and all the things she found out by doing it. Her physical and psychological connection to the sea told her things about herself, and her position in the world, and in writing about it she has peeled apart every facet of her life which has been touched by her realisations.

Last October I climbed Tryfan in the Ogwen Valley, Snowdonia, via the route named Grooved Arete. I was pushed past my mental and physical limits multiple times throughout the 200m vertical climb on the mountain’s East face, on which I was accompanied by my brother, a much more experienced climber. As I looked over my shoulder from the final ledge, and ran my hands over the grey-black volcanic rock, encrusted with bright white quartz crystals; it was the first time that day that I had actually considered where I was, and what I was interacting with. I felt guilty for not feeling closer to the mountain, like in some way at every stage I should have been aware of the billions of years of history under my fingers.

I ended the day feeling completely broken, but also as if I could literally do anything. A prescriptive set of steps in a guidebook resembled nothing of the actuality of the climb; the raw fear I felt as I stepped around a slab of rock with the wind whipping up from all directions, and hundreds of metres of nothing beneath me, could not be found between the lines of a logbook entry. The idea of ‘bagging’ a route, conquering a part of the landscape sometimes brings a sense of unease. It makes me feel like I’m not respecting the magnitude of scale and time embodied in that geology. I’m also coming at this from an incredibly privileged position in that I have always had easy access to the landscape as something to be enjoyed, associating it with holidays and adventures, and have never experienced barriers to participation because of my race or class.


FLUID – A Letter To the Thames

For Henri Bergson, time is something you can measure, but duration is the essence of a flux, a mutable presence into which the past is continuously melting. Bergson’s distinction between the quantitative nature of the past and the qualitative nature of our present experience is what brings me to thinking about a distinction between the solids of the Earth, the mountains and the rocks; and the liquids, the seas and rivers. Water contains the essence of the present. Solid, material surfaces and objects are what hold the history. If water is so full of Now, to me it makes sense that the land is full of Then.

The accumulation of material in mountains and the ground beneath our feet are a tangible build-up of time. The River is the present, sweeping through the solid ground, connecting the landmarks and surfaces of history with an ever-shifting current. Of course rocks and mountains are moving, albeit slowly to our eyes. And of course water is not actually ever-changing – every drop of water on Earth is the same as it was when the Earth cooled enough for it to form, we are simply held in an illusion that the water we experience is new every time because of the hugeness of the cycle it is part of. But relative to each other, the movement of each is dramatically different; this is why I make that distinction when viewing time through the lenses of solid and fluid.


AIR – A Letter to The Space Between The Clouds

I have always felt a lingering sense of helplessness and confusion over what my exact role is in correcting the catastrophic imbalance which we have imposed on the Earth, and onto ourselves as a result. What I do know is that I have a personal relationship to, and my own position on Earth (both in time and in space, and in the ‘mesh’, to steal a term from Timothy Morton’s book Hyperobjects). I must again go back and remind myself that the personal gives way to the universal. I can only write about and make things from my own perspective, and hope that it makes sense to someone. My own sense of being rests on an acknowledgement of interconnectedness, and a mindfulness of my relative insignificance to the wider world. It also relies on a placing, a focus on locality in time, its relationship to everything that has gone before, and everything that will come after. Lastly, it depends on an awareness of the differences between rates of change in physical bodies relative to each other, and how these differences sometimes allow me to just sneak a peek at the bigger picture.

I’ve talked about land and sea… So what about Air? Air is the final frontier. I have for so long been invested in rocks and water that I have failed to notice the very substance through which all things pass. As an artist directly involved in materiality, and by extension the materiality (or immateriality) of text, how can I understand something I cannot see or touch or read or manipulate? If a mountain is time, and a river is poetry, what is Air? It touches and infiltrates both. It has an enormous power and presence but no visible material, and its tangible physicality is felt only through its effects, not through the thing itself. To try to comprehend the materiality of Air is similar to trying to grasp the entirety of something like global warming, or oil, or glacier melt. It’s big, and it’s scary, and I think it all pivots on touch and vision.

Things we can’t see or touch are among the most frightening, because we can’t easily control them or keep them in check. So my question will now be: what has Air got to do with it? How does intangibility play into the challenge of thinking about our relationships to each other, or to the Earth? From this, I think I can expect to find even more questions, and even more reasons to interrogate materiality alongside immateriality. That space between the clouds will become the space in which we can form new ideas and solutions – the space between bodies is where we can look for the answers.

The above are extracts from my 2020 MA dissertation. Please email me if you would like to read the full version.

A table is set for five.

Somebody has laid things on the table. Somebody has placed an alphabet of implements spelling out words in a language that you can read. It makes you feel extremely important.

Every time you sit down, I sigh. You’ve got so many years behind you, but even more in front. No-one but me has seen everything you’ve done here.

Everything’s light now, your head (in a good way), your arms, the sky, the cars on the road… You’re dark inside though. There’s something jumping inside you and it won’t sit down!

The cup on the table wobbles, and it’s afraid it will spill its contents across the table, and across your field of vision, stopping you from seeing. It’s frightened that it won’t do its job and will let you down in unimaginable ways, causing you to encounter all sorts of problems which you won’t know how to solve.

The flowers at the centre of the table are looking at you. They’re gatekeepers, they stand for something altogether greater than you. You reckon they’re a bit cocky, but that’s just your jealousy talking. They’re probably perfect. Perfection… if you can really ever know the real meaning of perfect, which I doubt you can.

The flowers love you, and you don’t deserve it.

The landscape shudders under the pressure of the night. The red dust settles in swathes across the fields, and the grass bristles with anticipation, the mass of particles caressing its blades and causing it to weep tears of longing. Dawn comes, and the sun’s light is obscured by the haze of red, it stretches from ground to sky and across the horizon.

In through the open window, the red dust will drift in and choke you as you sleep. Or, that’s what you fear will happen. You’re convinced of it. The fence posts bend like they’re made of rubber. You think that this is a sign, a signal that it’s going to happen soon.

Meanwhile, the hills are resting. They won’t be there for long though, because they have overstayed their welcome. They’ll be gone soon. When I walk along the ridges, I look down at the ground. The scattered rocks at the peaks of these hills are interspersed with green life; there are small leaves which sing to me and tell me that I need to be kind to myself. They’re right, I suppose.

Those leaves place their guard over me, chlorophyll filters the good stuff and bathes me in a kind of verdant protection, and I can rest in the knowledge that I am still alive. Even when they die, I will be alright because they left something with me which helps me to keep myself safe.

When I sink down onto the mossy floor, it’s black and velvety and soft around my head as it muffles all sounds into a dull but comforting murmur.

I’m looking into the sink and i’m seeing another world. I touch the water, and try to suck it up through my fingers. I’ve spent hours looking at myself in the mirror.

The blanket of dark patterns welcomes me to become lost.

When I get up in the night I’m looking through my hair into the intense black sky, trying to make eye contact with the dotted lights. The stars and the street-lamps are one and the same, pricking their constellations across the blackboard, scraping their fingernails to make an infinite drawing.

The leaves plop one by one silently into the pond. When I visualise the silent ripple they make as they touch the water, it vibrates across my entire being. I want the oily dark water to creep into my ears as I crouch just beneath the surface. The drop of that leaf is… a moment of exquisite pleasure. It’s a rush of warm creamy satisfaction. When it is over, I just want it to happen again.

The cold night pierces my temples, so bracing that it almost hurts. I am hyper-aware of time taking place around me. I am feeling most like a human tonight.

At other times, the feeling is muddy. Great globs of fat are forcing their way through my consciousness, and the greasy trails they leave behind are likely to remain there for quite a while.

My fingertips are threatening to peel off to nothing. I’m wondering how I can stop a process I know is already in motion, something which has been moving since I was born, probably, and only gives the illusion that it is just beginning. And yet, every day I manage to convince myself that the less I think about it, the smaller it will become.

I didn’t plan for the future because I could never imagine one for myself. Now I’m here, I’m stuck for ideas a lot of the time. I didn’t think I’d get this far.