I am working through fields of writing and sculpture to explore systems of knowledge, mythos and storytelling. I have been creating installations suggestive of narrative universes that blend real world histories, personalities and objects with suggested alternative histories or speculative futures. These include an extensive project (The Marque of the Third Stripe, 2007-09) taking Adi Dassler, the founder of the Adidas shoe company and reimagining him as a Faustian figure in a universe of reversed history and reversed geography in which America is the Old World and Europe—the New World—is the frontier of civilization.

The mechanisms of narrative are allowed to become a facet of the works themselves. In the tale of Adi Dassler, the Gothic novel’s tropes are exaggerated and mutated. The text of the novella that I wrote took the convention of stories within stories, narrations within narrations and extended it until all the chapters became embedded within each other, the reader never surfacing back into the ‘original’ story.

I have been developing structures that explore language through esoteric and cryptic systems inspired by hermeticism . I have invented synæsthetic languages to translate stories into films of a) monochromatic colours (A Thousand and One Knights of the Roundtable of Knottingham 2005-08) and b) patterns of black and white squares (The Marque of the Third Stripe, 2007-09). The latter language was developed into a 1,080 page dictionary explaining the significance of each symbol and describing the meaning of its equivalent English words.

I have also been investigating language through anagrammatic analysis. In an ongoing series, The Economist magazine, the liberal bible of our time is reconfigured and collaged, its headlines becoming absurd or profound aphorisms, the adverts and front covers becoming alchemistical diagrams.

Sculpture and installations have been explored as sites for narratives to be suggested and at the same time undercut. In 2008, I collaborated with Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe (Hello Methlab in the Sun, 2008) to create a labyrinthine environmental installation suggestive of a disused methamphetamine laboratory paired with abandoned spaces evoking abandoned 1960’s counterculture utopias and cultish corporate museums. The same year I collaborated with Rita Sobral Campos (UNCLEHEAD 2008) to create a pseudo-authoritarian museum replete with quotidian objects from the implied autocratic state. This very cold regimented space was invaded by a parasitic structure, a sheetrock barricade that attacked the space by firing spit balls: pellets of propaganda posters reduced and crumpled into little wet paper balls that were ejected by an air gun, accreting on the rest of the ‘museum’ like pidgeon guano.

I have been working on a series of flow charts or brain storms (Assembly Instructions 2008-09) utilising collages I have created from black and white photocopies. These systems range from simple arrangements of a dozen up to a hundred and twenty framed works, all connected via pencil drawn dots on the wall. These thought systems explore many different topics including using Ikea stores as mnemonic devices; tracing the vector of a persons confession through the hierarchy of the catholic church; casting the lead characters of Grey’s Anatomy and Sex and the City as 19th century Byronic Anti-Heroes; the emotionally pornographic nature of in-flight movies; the nature of tangential logic as evinced in dreams, drug highs and mental illness; proposed alternative artworks for Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni; the truth behind the prevalence of equestrian statuary in western cities; a proposed non-linear, rhizomic approach to magic tricks; the notion that all colours are contained not within white but within brown; and so on.

The same materials from these flow charts has been developed into a series of lecture performances (Assembly Instructions [lecture], 2008-9). Using overhead projectors, I have transferred the collages to acetate transparencies which are layered on the projector’s glass, swapped, changed and manipulated in simple and tactile ways. I run through the images explaining the connections and threads of the thought-chains sometimes diverging and musing on tangents, other times pressing on swiftly through many interconnected ideas giving the impression of an associative, stream of consciousness discourse.

My focus has been shifting from singular objects and environments to works that operate across disciplines and that mutate throughout their various incarnations. None of the projects outlined above have definite finished instances; each one has shifted and changed, improved, succeeded and failed at times as they have been re-exhibited. I’m particularly interested in using books as the repository for these projects. The book allows for a cataloguing and compiling of disparate works whilst at the same time presenting an opportunity to place the original works within a meta-work. The book of (The Marque of the Third Stripe, 2007-09) contains not only the text of the story, the synæsthetic dictionary and plates of the work, but also a series of essays formatted in the style of Wikipedia. These essays that explore ideas adjunct to the cosmology of the story, share the same uneasy relationship to veracity that Wikipedia does. In fact the final essay recounts how Denis Diderot deliberately inserted fallacious tales into L’Encyclopédie as a ruse to see if his entries were being plagiarized by others.

Currently, I’m working on a film-script to be read aloud as a performance, an Aristophanic comedy, and also a radio-play. I’m very interested in the problem of reconciling the narrative in literature, theatre, opera and so on with the abstract formalism inherent in modern art. In this my guide is Wagner’s notion of the gesamstkunstwerk. Though as much as it inspires me, I find his approach problematic and his work in the end, not entirely successful. I’d like to take instead as a model for a gesamstkunstwerk, Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. The image I have of Wagner’s work is of an unwieldy cake, layers of abstract and narrative disciplines lying on top of each other: jam, drama; sponge, music; icing, scenery; poetry, cherries. In the Mozartian opera however, the analogy that I would suggest is of the caduceus, the ancient Greek motif of two snakes: here drama and music, narrative and abstraction, are intertwined about each other; each one is symbiotic to and yet also parasitic of the other. Take one away and the other fails completely. But together, they form the perfect balance.