I have decided to change how I am using this Blog. It had been pasting up half baked critical theories that desperately needed critique but this is only suitable for a very select audience. I have decided instead that this blog should become more of a diary. I have a list of shows coming up over the next few months, and this is might turn into some kind of tour diary, but this isn't really a proper tour. The shows are going to take various unusual forms, from art installations to video screenings to stand-up poetry readings to guerrilla happenings and I am going to attempt to tie up this series disparate events. Some of this is going to be funny anecdotes and sometimes it will wonder into theories, philosophies and proposition.

My recent art practice has spun off on differing trajectories. I am currently studying for an Masters of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. Late last year I developed a performance poetry project. The project initially grew from work I had been doing with rock band The Blo Boys and I had started by taking the lyrics and reading them to audiences as poetry without music. I also started writing some poetry specifically for this format of presentation. Being a stand up performer is quite a brave (or perhaps foolish) thing to do as in front of an audience you are very vulnerable. Rather than take the conventional approach of trying to become more secure I had instead tried to exploit this vulnerability.

Initially the poetry received an awkward critical response as people did not know where it stood.– Was it art? Was it music? Was it theatre? Was it poetry? What the hell was I actually trying to do? Eventually I started to secure my unusual position through a series of shows and radio performances help by the patronage of the great Bob & Roberta Smith. I started to get offered more shows and was asked for proposals and applications.

As these proposals were being processes I returned to the studio to work on some new material and started making a series of video that aimed to resolve many of the criticism I had received. Building on the live performance poetry, these video were directed to focus on the performance rather than the poems. Some of the early videos have been proposed for public screening, but most of this work has not been shown publicly. However it has received a remarkably positive critical response from those who have seen it. It is more refined and also much drier than the live work, but has also lost a little of the fun of live shows and feels mediated by video.

Though the video work has received a good critical response and presents a new direction for my research, meanwhile proposals for show I put forward earlier in the year have been processed and I am out of the studio and doing live shows again with old material. My practice iperusingng different directions.


I have also become involved in a group called The Union and I am creating collaborative work as part of this as well.

Mean while I am still also trying to pay the bills by running my own business designing commercial websites.

It has all gone in different directions and I hope that this blog may navigate though all this confusion!