Lowry/Duchamp. It is not only the same visual motifs that haunt my artistic practice, but a much older mode of artmaking also seems to have returned. I dreamt that I went to visit a famous artist. The artist lived in a terraced house in Manchester similar to my own home. The artist who opened the door and invited me inside was both L. S. Lowry and Marcel Duchamp, but bore a marked resemblance to the playwright Dennis Potter. The house retained wallpaper from the nineteen sixties and had not been redecorated since. Lowry/Duchamp said he had something important to show me. He pointed to a drawing in graphite that hung above the sofa in the living room. The drawing looked out of place against the mustard and brown geometric patterned wallpaper. The drawing was an astonishingly realistic depiction of a curled up sleeping dog, completely at odds with Lowry’s stick men or Duchamp’s conceptualism. Lowry/Duchamp took the drawing down off the wall and told me to look closer. It then d...

  Detritus of a disordered mind:   The soul, our life’s star, Hath elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar. William Wordsworth, “Ode (‘Intimations of Immortality’)” in William Wordsworth: Selected Poetry , ed. Nicholas Roe (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 209.   Last night, in my dream, I was taking part in a group exhibition. I go to the building where the exhibition is taking place. I enter the basement and see an old mattress with a pile of artworks on top. I look through them and realise that these are my old paintings and drawings. Many are damaged and look as though they have been here for years. I go upstairs and look around the exhibition space. No one will speak to me. There is an empty space where my artworks should have been. The curator looks annoyed with me. I pass someone I used to know and they look away. I realise that the other artists are finishing hanging their works. It dawns on me that I should have been here long ago and hung my own ...