Translation.   ‘We must dream of promised lands and fields That never fade in season   As we move towards no end we learn to die…’   These lines from Killing Joke’s “Love Like Blood” come from the paper insert of a cassette of their album Night Time. I have always suspected that this cassette, bought in South East London in the early 1990’s, was a bootleg. The sound quality is terrible; there is a long, initial silence that resembles the beginning of a vinyl recording. I kept it purely for “Love Like Blood.” The thing is, in the 80’s and early 90’s, we were bootlegging all the time, performing magical transfers of music from one media into another. It was a secret code; if someone liked you, they would offer to do you a cassette of their Zodiac Mindwarp album or introduce you to Dub Reggae by giving you a mix tape. My sister and I had a tacit agreement regarding music. Often, we hated each other’s taste in music. She thought my Goth tastes were ...

  Magical Thinking. My artistic practice may well be the unconscious expression of a form of magical thinking rooted in my early interest in the occult and alchemy. Such interests permeated Renaissance humanism and probably arose due to a revived interest in Neoplatonism. According to Philip Ball, ‘… the Neoplatonic universe is organised according to principles of correspondence, for example so that certain plants and metals are associated with particular planets that govern their behaviour in an invisible conspiracy of sympathies.’ Philip Ball, Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (London: The Bodley Head, 2014), 20. He also writes that, ‘These relationships were often revealed in the outward forms of nature: they could be read literally from the surface of things.’ Philip Ball, Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (London: The Bodley Head, 2014), 20.   Such correspondences form the basis for sympathetic or natural magic. I was fascinated by t...

  Inheritance. I dream that I have inherited a beautiful art nouveau house. In one of the rooms there were wooden carvings on the walls of sleeping dogs, but they are fire damaged beyond repair. I had this dream around the time I left my art-practice based research program as I was too unwell to continue. I simply interpreted it as saying I was suffering from burnout. I didn’t consider the fact that sleeping dogs had returned in this dream. In this case the sleeping dogs have to be left alone because they are too damaged to restore. I have been given a beautiful inheritance but I need to leave it alone. The thing I left alone was my artistic practice. I did not do any drawing for two and a half years. I realised that my artistic practice if frankly daemonic, if I go with it and work when my soul returns from the underworld, all goes well. If I try to be creative at any other time things do not go well. My artistic practice has its own logic, one that has always remained a mys...

  Black Book. Dreams not only come from the past but also the future. Often a dream only makes sense much later, often years later. In one such dream I dreamt that I was supporting a man with Parkinson's disease. I was making his bed and found a black book under his mattress, hidden from his wife. I wondered what indiscretions the book contained. I did not open it but put it back where I found it. Perhaps the dream was telling me that I too would create a black book full of indiscretions, my copy book. The contemporary notion of art is one of personal authorship, originality and imagination. My artistic practice is none of those things. It is an anachronism, the survival or return of a much older way of creating art. For a long time, I kept this aspect of my artistic practice a secret. Having gone through my old artworks I am now more interested in this aspect of my practice. The black book can now come out from under the mattress. The creation of a copy book is a way of embr...