chains

pencil on paper 60 x 42 cm 2025

mo mono

Disquiet and Misrule: Point Zero One

Pencil on paper, after Hieronymus Bosch, 2025, 59 x 42 cm

Notes: thinking forward to our first garage exhibition in the Spring of 2026.

How do we function in a country who’s government is rogue? What can be the state of play when acts of kindness and sympathy are declared foul and terror. Currency and resources, extracted with a smirk, dumped into overflowing coffers. The centre has been glutted and has puffed up. The Military-industrial Complex brims with pride and blood. The mouth-pieces guarantee the sanctity of slaughter. (Government stands with genocide.)

Above the village of Lakenheath in Suffolk an airplane makes a noise that – down here on the ground – pounds our heads and threatens to split eardrums. We wander the village, peering in the church at it’s phenoms in wood (a direct rendering of one phenom below), looking around the pretty and the slightly chaotic streets. I photograph a plane disappearing off to our right and wonder at it’s destination, Lakenheath has a military installation, it may be one on its way to Gaza.

A week or so later we hear that there is now a protest on the front gate of the military site. Further searches and this rather thorough piece of history turns up: https://lakenheathallianceforpeace.org.uk/about-lakenheath-base/ confirming that war planes were sent to Gaza, US war planes, and that there’s a (informed) suspicion that the place may hold nuclear weapons for the US.

‘Man Eating Shit Out His Arsehole’ Digital Drawing, 2025.

There’s a sense of unease about, the internet is dripping with doom, there’re good reasons for this. Our leaders have openly admitted they condone attacking and killing the population to pursue ideological objectives. Not uh that there are real, actual justification…. The more people try to ignore it the more language absorbs the violence and bloody abuse grows in our conversations, our politics.

as 2025 comes to it’s end

Some monoprinting…

return

facsimiles and jasper vii

Nor is there any embarrassment in the fact that we’re ridiculous, isn’t it true? For it’s actually so, we are ridiculous, light-minded, with bad habits, we’re bored, we don’t know how to look, how to understand, we’re all like that, all, you, and I, and they! Now, you’re not offended when I tell you to your face that you’re ridiculous? And if so, aren’t you material? You know, in my opinion it’s sometimes even good to be ridiculous, if not better: we can the sooner forgive each other, the sooner humble ourselves; we can’t understand everything at once, we can’t start right out with perfection! To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well. This I tell you, you, who have already been able to understand. .. and not understand … so much. I’m not afraid for you now.

‘The Idiot’ Fyodor Dostoevsky

There needed a historic perspective to ‘Figs & Wasps’ not dominated by the interests of the financier. John Clare and William Blake brought the experience – seeing industrial feudalism ravage the country. Blake in particular gave us as complete a run through of the ideologies of empire as possible. Expressing the horror of a society enslaving and devouring people and land. I did not want to make Blake my focus – I couldn’t according to my original plan.

I was flicking through the internet and read that Dostoevsky had took some inspiration for Prince Myshkin from Don Quixote. A little further light research confirmed it and so I reread ‘The Idiot’ and followed the logic. The adventurer – a literary hero – who achieves nothing of note, nothing of note beyond their spreading confusion, frustration…. amongst readers and their fellow characters. Like Tristram Shandy or Leopold Bloom.

Don Quixote riding a Rhinoceros, digital print, 2025.

Myshkin’s capacity to converse, or rather his capacity to engage lucidly with people – those of Russian society his title enables him to relate to – lasts as long as the book. He offers his view that life could be kind, people could be kind, and that people deserve sympathy. And the people he speaks to are confounded.

Admitting weakness, admitting confusion – allowing frustration to run it’s course – accepting our incomplete state in the face of narrative’s absolute.

Free Swimming Larvae of the Polyclad

(After Lang.)

Taken from ‘Animals Without Backbones: 1’ by Ralph Buchsbaum from Pelican Books.

Anonymous: Whatn

One fine October morning

In September, last July,

The moon lay thick upon the ground,

The snow shone in the sky;

The flowers were singing gaily

And the birds were in full bloom,

I went down to the cellar

To sweep the upstairs room.

Anon.

festooning vicissitudes

having continuing difficulties photographing – these are the better efforts.