I keep intending to get a website: in the meantime I’ll use this blog to store my own work. These images are from my exhibition, Alphabeater, at Megalo Print Studio and Gallery, 6–17 October 2009.
I started this blog for my drawing students: all the stuff on the other pages is the work of other artists, not mine.

‘One part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.’ James Joyce on Finnegans Wake

Photographs by Stuart Hay, ANU Photography.

These hairy prints, wiry drawings and mechanical gadgetry are inspired by the peculiar language of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
Joycean text appears in ways that mirror its idiosyncrasy and indecipherability: in one piece text from Finnegans Wake punched into paper is so fragile that it seems to be in the process of disintegration; in another the text is so densely overlaid that single words are no longer recognisable. In other works the idea of text is abstracted into grid structures that are variously disrupted: a grid of steel filaments so fine it is barely visible: fragile hairs interrupt surfaces; a tangled, chaotic weaving scarcely attaches to its supporting structure; a delicate net woven from hairs blends into the supporting wall. Sound emanates from a musical gadget playing a pianola-style punched paper strip: a rendering into holes of James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake.
In these pieces the capacity of language to order and control the chaotic disparate material of human life leans, like Finnegans Wake, towards disorder and disintegration.

Finnegans Wake read by James Joyce, arranged for 20-note paper strip musical movement

Finnegans Wake: 226631 wakewords

Finnegans Wake

Wordloosed

Wayword

hardly holds

almost not

Per(f)oration

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