CosmiKnot

The Fungus Foray and Rhizomatic Being Full Fungus Foray images Before setting off on today’s fungus foray I’d been thinking about memory. About how memory is perhaps not simply within the brain waiting to be picked up off the shelf but rather is in the objects around us. I was standing in the back garden looking at my neighbour from hell’s ladder. I found it hard to look at the ladder without relieving the various kinds of abuse we have suffered at his hands. (Thanks to a police visit he seems to have gotten the message that everyone has a right to live without fear of abuse). Still I was ok and it seemed to demonstrate how objects in the outside world don’t just trigger memory they help embody it. Ever since attending a lecture about consciousness by Marcus du Sautoy (Professor for public understanding of science at Oxford University) at The Barbican I’ve had a sense of unease about the way we conceive of our consciousness from a machine-like perspective. It’s similar to visual...

Kings place. Oh my god I’m back You finally did it How can I be so curmudgeonly as to deny the seduction at play? Oh the pristine vintage cobbles The plate glass fronted warehouse arches Framing slim silhouete of new student Who sips coffee Totally amazing tote bags University of the Arts Tram lines flow encased at floor level As archival patina Of an industrious past It’s all good How can I fail to see that this is betterer Double plus gooderer I visit an exhibition of Soviet childrens books Encased in glass Remember the smell of mildew? Its freezing here comrade. I grasp and gasp Hoping for the oxygen of something actual The fleeting memory of a real experience An actual event. There is a hand printed lino cut cover For A Russian book of Walt Whitman’s O Pioneer. Is this it? The moment that evaded the death grip The strangulation by equivalence? Asphixiation by reproductive thingness. I think it is And a part of me celebr...

Growing up then Is the move into a state of detachment It is the move into the realm Of subject and object Where what was once real is Redelivered as an orange Endorphin promoting chance card That niggles your synaptic network Then and only then When real life is a series of printed or onscreen equivalence Can your grown up mind Pen you into the rational domain By telling you that the embodied life of felt sense is in the past And therefore pure nostalgia Which we all know is bad And then it will continually feed you Golden nuggets of vintage Leaving you too woozy to care

The train conductors are now falling ill The railway company says the strike is not necessary It does not think - why are they striking? Let alone Why are they falling ill? This is because the railway company thinks in binary efficiency Empathy cannot be captured in units Metric tables cannot explain why they are unhappy Unhappy at being communicated with in binary The railway company does not compute The railway company is a vulcan culture Magnetic data strip memories The conducting people make bad jokes They are humans after all In the interests of safety Please don't stand on the tables Now they are falling ill Being treated like a piece of data makes you sick Unless you are sick already The art school lecturers are falling ill also Like the islanders drinking stagnant water Wondering why they have the shits They keep turning water into why? The binary why brigade History is the lives of individual people Says the academic cultural materialist Hurrying ...

They are talking about education on the radio. I haven’t really heard enough to workout the specifics but the gist is about how we could change education if we could start again. I think they are saying that social relations ought to be made part of the experience. I just suddenly thought what an insane world we live in that we are able to convince ourselves that an education system based on competition is in any way an evolved way of organising our lives. This tells me that I am not a realist. I mean a realist would say, “that is the way of the world so we must prepare our children for it”. That was in a deep resonant alpha control voice in case you didn’t pick that up. The other thing we’d say is something about human nature and that we can’t change that. This all makes me realise the eternal paradox of being human. The enlightenment tried to help us evolve through the use of reason and higher thinking but that ended in lots of heads being chopped off and scientism trapping us in a ...

Celts: Art and Identity – The British Museum As an exhibition this was a major influence of my Deadend works in how it openly struggled to present an ostensibly unknowable culture within the structuralist framework of received knowledge. It highlighted the problem of analysing (a) culture through the fixed parameters of current evidence based frameworks. There could be no clearer illustration of the distortion or impasse created by subject object separation. Each age projects an idea of itself onto the past – this is particularly apparent within the industrial Victorian romanticisation of the Celt. This apparent presentation of subjectivity as truth is what Cultural Materialism and Nonrepresentational theory redress. Gundestrup Cauldron C150-50 BC

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When the art is from the heart the viewer will always see what's in their own.

my hand with this pen this pen in this hand declares my love declares my love for you my love for you declares my eyes this pen perceives my love for you declaring for you my love declaring This love for you I feel Here on this paper I feel love for you Each looping letter on flowing Full of love and longing Your face and eyes I see with my mind's eye seeing As my hand moves My hand moves across the space Declaring my love My love for the blissful worlds within Your face reminds me Not to refrain from longing

Here is a link to a comic strip I've done with a long standing friend and interrogator The Aug Stone. I love Aug's affinity to a natural state of wonder, which made making the comic a total pleasure. He gave me free rein with clear instructions as to the setting. Writing a comic is much more than just filling in speech bubbles. Aug has created an existential miss-en-scene without breaking sweat. His visualisation of the scenario is genuinely bizarre and dreamlike without feeling contrived. Funnily enough Aug thinks that the story is perhaps too obviously personal but I've been working on it a while and it still intrigues and niggles away at my unconscious. The story seems to lead towards a meaning but never wholly explains itself, which is exactly what I want from a tale, rather than a moral observation or rousing resolution. Click the picture to see the whole thing.

In June last year I installed my Doctorate painting exhibition at UEL. I don’t like to say it was about David Bowie’s song Life on Mars, though not because it wasn’t (it was) but because I’m not sure it was “about” anything. It was more an attempt to capture some kind of essence that I felt Bowie represents. One of the things I love about Bowie from that song onwards is how he captures the meaninglessness of modern life but fills his songs with meaning. The meaning, however, is not something easy to put your finger on. It is more like a feeling of yearning and hope in the face of… well yes meaninglessness. You might think I’m being pretentious but this depth of feeling is what keeps us as humans dreaming that we can ultimately connect through creative experience. That is partially what Bowie means to me. He can be viewed as the personification of Camus’ urge to live life as fully and creatively as possible in response to the Sisyphusian struggles we all face. But let me be clear...

white feather As I lay on the black disc of the 8 ft in Demeter trampoline entombed by netted walls staring down the wishing well of infinity curve blue a small white cloud was dropped into the azure field of my vision. Whereupon it became A tiny fluffy white feather thousands of miles above the earth falling silently like a speeding weightless bullet onto the tip of my right big toe. What does this mean? I wonder staring at the clouds. Oh I give up.