I’m going to be returning to talking about art and all the related stuff I usually talk about in the next few weeks, but until then I wanted to post a few pictures from another walk. In some ways these walks are related to my art practice, serving as one of many sources of inspiration - my…
Yesterday Kate and I took the 77 bus from Brighton Station up to Devil’s Dyke. This bus only runs on weekends and public holidays and takes about 20 minutes to get out to Devil’s Dyke, stopping right outside the pub of the same name. £5 return fare per person. Click any of the photos…
I’ve lifted the term “post-apocalyptic pastoral” from a book review by Goodreads user Terry from Toronto who effectively seeded my reading list by citing Richard Jefferies’ After London: or, Wild England (1885), Edgar Pangborn’s Davy (1964), Richard Cowper’s The Road To Corlay (1978),…
Read the rest of “Post-apocalyptic pastoral and post-industrial”…
I’ve been thinking lately about woods and meadows and the edges of lakes, places of importance in my own personal mythology that feed into my artwork. So far in my Acid Renaissance series these places have only manifested at a distance, distilled into human figures as genii locorum, spirits…
Yesterday I posed a question on Twitter as a short thread that I’ll reformat here for easy reading: I’m trying to put together a vague explanation for the increased use—by artists (such as myself), writers, musicians, filmmakers, etc—of a particular view of Britain that is simultaneously…
Read the rest of “Notes on re-enchantment as resistance in Deep England”…
Note: An extended version of this blog post is available in my book of artwork England’s Dark Dreaming, available to order from our online shop. On some days, when the veil between worlds is at its thinnest, it is said that you can glimpse the mythical land of Deep England, particularly if…
I’ve now finished the first 5 of my England’s Dark Dreaming series of drawings. I wish I could show you them at their full size—one metre high—rather than the relatively small digital photographs of them, because the physical scale of a piece of artwork affects your reaction to it. Having…
I'm increasingly convinced that the country is temporally fractured, and we should be expecting a visit from Sapphire & Steel any time now. Everything seems to operate on skewed oneiric logic. Everyone is reduced to ill-disguised cyphers, woodenly acting roles and reciting lines. The series of…
A few days ago on Twitter I was thinking out loud about the film The Witch, which I watched on Saturday evening, specifically about its relationship to the theme of Folk Horror which is getting some interesting attention recently. Folk Horror seems to be a nebulous concept to define, even though…
I have a confession to make: I don’t particularly like some of the new nature writing. Some of the old stuff bores me too. I should probably clarify that a bit: I don’t want to read piles of books describing authors’ walks through the landscape, each book interspersed with worthy monologues…