List of Elements:
Outer: Sweets, Beast, Breath, Scan, Pipe, Rubber.
Inner: Blood, Sighs, Rod, Line, Dog, Panties, Mud.


This is a mask I bought in Venice last year. I bought two and gave one to another artist in the States. A month ago he told me I would soon be receiving his adaptation in the mail which kick started me into working on mine. I started playing with tape and stuffing and morphing the original shape. As I worked I realised I was obscuring the very form which attracted me to it originally. It is not one of the traditional theater masks but a very blank natural shape that I felt could be approached as a person and portrait. I started again with a pencil using the outside to represent the female form and as it dried decided it was not done. There was something more, something less obvious. I started painting the inside red and remembered a map I had drawn full of words years ago that had represented the elements of man on the inner circle and the elements of the individual on the outer. I used this format and rewrote the map showing the exchange of physical/archaic and intellectual/modern information that occurs with outer and inner elements.

My sketchbooks more and more lately are pages of text; notes, quotes and plans for work. This is probably due to the practical nature of working on long term projects and feeling the importance of binding work with the literature that partly brought it about. I have found that to return to the practice of mark making I must be enticed by something as undesirous and simple as brown packing paper.

The passage of a three dimensional object, a sketchbook or sculpture, that can be touched and altered, marks its development and growth. Just like the development of a living organism some aspects will remain throughout while others mutate and change. This is what is so appealing, to converse silently using my preferred vocabulary and build something tangible that requires the collaboration of strangers.

These are details from some mail art correspondence between Sarah Wolfe and myself (see more of her work on the link in the Friends section). Looking at the post marks on the cover the first date of sending was in February 2006. In three and a half years it has traveled between Chelsea and Brooklyn in New York, between California and Germany and now here in England it will soon be heading back to New York.

Being able to maintain a dialogue with artists through the post, especially those who travel as much as I do has a particular sense of satisfaction for me. Especially in an age where most imagery is viewed electronically post has become more specialized and will earn a greater historic and artistic value similar to the evolution of intaglio prints as it becomes more obsolete.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

"All was the same as before. Even on the coldest nights the Sunny Dixie Show was open. The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow" Carson McCullers

The Black Bat

Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone:
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the roses blown.

For a breeze of morning moves,
And the planet of Love is on high,
Beginning to faint in the light that she loves,
To faint in his light, and to die.

Excerpt from Alfred Lord Tennyson's 1855 poem 'Maud'

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

KARL MARX