Writing
Below is a list of different pieces of writing. Some of them are quite short, because they are snippets of ideas or quick associations. With time, hopefully, some of them will grow, developing as the ideas they are trying to depict, refine, or experiment with become deeper, broader, and more layered. I list them here together as I hope that seeing them together will aid finding connections between them, rather than segmenting them as separate thoughts. They are listed in chronological order, most recently altered first.
Geology Poster
Lots of things have happened. Lots of things are going to happen. Somewhere, in between those two lines that stretch out in their respective directions, an event occurred. That event could only be titled accurately as: ‘Teaching German Children about Geology’. One of the objects that was created and used during that event was a big wall hanging. I think you’re meant to write the answers in chalk into the boxes.
After a further series of events subsequent to that, or at least subsequent to its production, this wall hanging found itself in Nunhead, at the top of Vesta Road just off the roundabout. It was there that I found it. That was probably two years ago. The hanging string had come off at one end.
I recently hung it for the first time at the exhibition called ‘Torpor’ that me and my housemates put on at home. To do this I had to epoxy glue the broken string back on, and drill two holes into the brickwork of my rented bedroom to put wall plugs and long screws into. Now it hangs.
I’m glad it hangs. It calms me down. It’s quite visually appealing, which helps. I like that it’s trying to teach me something, even if I can’t understand very much German. Most crucially, it’s always nice to think about time as a monumental, inexhaustible body or substance, rather than a series of sequential moments. Fourthly, it’s all blue on the other side, which looks nice too.
We’re currently in the ‘Erdneuzeit’, or Cenozoic geological era. ‘It is characterized by the dominance of mammals, insects, birds and angiosperms’ says Wikipedia. That’s good to know. Those are some of my favourite sorts.
K&T Tilts 2024 Diary
I got this diary from my last job. K&T Tilts were in a neighbouring unit in the industrial park. A tilt is a tarpaulin, the sort you would use for a haulage truck, or apparently for circus tents. They were getting rid of these diaries, and I nabbed one.
It captivated me on two levels. Firstly, there’s an incredible amount of information in its first 30 or so pages. Unit conversions, time zones, travel times between locations, an assortment of facts one might want close to hand. Secondly, frankly, I was baffled by it as a viable business expense. I don’t know if the photo quite communicates how fancy this diary is. It’s an elegant and functional object from a bygone era, and yet there it is, emblazoned on the front, in gold; ‘2024’.
Diaries are where you keep a record of what stuff will happen. It’s sort of a written premonition.
I used this diary to tell a story about a company, one that opens at the beginning of the year, but has fallen apart by the end. There are some ups; they book clients, film social media content, and hire an employee called Juniper. They even get to go on QVC. But ultimately things go wrong quite quickly, because people stop paying for their product or service. But before that, lots of events do take place, and they are listed here in this peculiar object that I got before a job I had went wrong too.
Begun: 2nd March 2025
Updated: 2nd March 2025
Wooden Boat
Boats float. Humans sort of float, but only for a bit. That’s why we make boats.
I made a boat. Sort of. I don’t think it would float. It’s too small for me to get in too, of course.
But I did make it out of wood. Western Red Cedar, to be precise. They make boats out of it in America, sometimes. It doesn’t rot (handy). I’ve been learning to make things better out of wood recently. It’s good, is wood.
I want to float. I’m not in the sea, but it seems mighty close. If it gets to where I am, I’ll want a boat. Maybe one a little like this one.
It’s not on an even keel. I’ll admit, I did cut it to look like that. That was a sculptural illusion. The good thing about boats is that they will rock in rough seas, but they won’t sink, not always, not straight away.
I’m looking at a book right now called the ‘Physics of Sailing Explained’. It used to be my Granddad’s, he liked sailing and that sort of thing. There’s a chapter on keels. Apparently, the keel is the pointy flat bit that pokes downwards out the bottom of the hull. Its purpose is to ‘prevent side-slipping when the wind is from the side... [and] to provide a counterbalance to help reduce heeling’. I don’t quite know what those things mean, but it sounds like it might mean ‘get chucked about less, and don’t flip over’. They can sit at funny angles, given no choice but to be at that angle, pushed to them by weather conditions, but they’ve got their heels dug in and they won’t go any further. They’ll just float like that if they need to.
You can also get lift from a keel. Not just float, lift! That’s quite clever. I’ll have to save that one for the next boat though. For now I just want to stay the right way up, and out of the drink.
Begun: 22nd February 2025
Updated: 22nd February 2025
Gnomes
I am disgusted by gnomes. I am also jealous. My disgust might in fact just be jealousy. But for now, I shall read it as disgust.
The gnomes are men of leisure. They are comfortably dressed, comfortably seated often. They usually reside in gardens. They often have a hobby, say, fishing, or smoking a pipe.
Because of the altered system of priorities and responsibilities in the magical plane of reality upon and within which gnomes live, they don’t work. Simply by being gnomes, they survive. They endure. While their paint scratches and flakes off, they watch everything around them rot and die, without ever having to move off of their perch to battle for sustenance in the mud with the other creatures.
This makes them cheery, it seems. At least from afar. But perhaps, when approached, we can see more clearly how this idle state has taken a toll on them. They seem wonderfully at peace from the kitchen window, but a closer look shows them to be worse for wear, and their state of (non)affairs less desirable. It’s less certain they’re really enjoying themselves.
Maybe comfort is disgusting. And yet I am still jealous of them. Maybe I want to be disgusting.
Pictured are 6 drawings of gnomes I have made, with a fine-liner and a red crayon, on brown paper. Also, a small sculpture, made with a gnome I found in the big Tesco in Surrey Quays Shopping Centre, an offcut of wood, and two screws.
When I saw the gnome in big Tesco, I hatched a nasty plan. I wanted to get that gnome off his ass. Now, because I am cruel to him, he is stood up, bearing the log he used to lay against.
P.S... I will happily accept allegations of ageism in this mythological analysis of mine. Those concerns are not unfounded and I share them too. I can only plead that my feelings on the humble (or smug??) gnome are very conflicted and still a work in progress
Begun: 20th February 2025
Updated: 20th February 2025
Supply Chain Realism
Our stuff, which we need, is made by capitalists. Our stuff is commodities. In our homes, we are surrounded by possessions. Outside the house, particularly in urban environments, we are surrounded by objects. All of these objects, whether they’re ours or not, form our material culture1. And our material culture, the products of human creation, is almost entirely manufactured capitalist structures and incentives.
We intensely understand this. We can intuit how the processes that have brought an item into our immediate vicinity were driven and altered by profit motives. The logic of why a producer would produce a profitable product is completely obvious to us, and the inverse mostly unthinkable. These logics are inextricably mineralised into the object’s bodies, when we look at them or touch them we can feel the crust it forms.
As well as this imminent tangibility, there is also a deep abstraction in our understanding of capitalist material culture. Complex and globalised supply chains have, especially for those in the West, further veiled the origins of any one product. We know our things come from somewhere, most likely China, but where and how exactly is an intractable mish mash of actions and interactions, whose elucidation reveals little to us anyway. We are comfortable leaving this gap unbroached.
Most crucially perhaps, we need these things. Our lives are sustained and benefitted by these commodities. For many examples, we cannot imagine going without them.
This combination - the materialised yet abstracted understanding of capitalisms effect on the objects around us, and their necessity to us - evokes capitalist production as indomitable. It structures our material surroundings so totally that imagining material surroundings built on other economics principles has become impossible. The material world and the structures it results from is far more imminent to us than any idea we might have of an alternate societal form.
Begun: 5th March 2024
Last Updated: 17th June 2024
Timeboat
I take time
I am time
Time holds me, like a boat
The things I care about take time
The things I care about are time, made of it
I will make a boat, to hold me
Begun: 17th June 2024
Last Updated: 17th June 2024
Peace Meeting
A bird from the sky right through the eye.
The bird had, for a brief moment, blocked the sun. In that instant, light flickered through as a splash, and coating and warming every feather on its body.
But its momentum carried it forward. Beak outstretched, it plummeted towards the heart of my pupil.
I closed my lids before we made our deep embrace. Feathers warm from its flight. Sky grounded, air becomes full, sun meets the earth.
Begun: 21st March 2024
Last Updated: 21st March 2024
Why I Want To Be A Carpenter
I want to train to be a carpenter, because I think the world is going to really change a lot in the coming years, but I think making things with wood will remain useful.
I like wood. It feels nice. I’ve spent a lot of time touching it, picking it up, moving it, and most importantly, chopping it up into smaller pieces. I spent a lot of time in my adolescence in a small wood with my Dad and some of his friends processing fallen trees into firewood. Despite my enjoyment of this activity and the tactile quality of the material at its centre, it didn’t occur to me until later in life that it might be fun to make things with wood, rather than just chop it up.
Why I Don’t Want To Make Speculative Design
I think about the future a lot. For this reason, when I heard about speculative design, I was quite enamoured by it, as a medium, movement, or method that investigates the future. That is, designs from a possible future. You might call these objects a guess, but they’re less sincere than that implies. It most often takes the form of a provocation about contemporary behaviour, topic, or system, attempting to materialise some of its potential repercussions ahead of schedule.
But I don’t think I want to do that any more, for two reasons:
1. I am absolutely bricking it about what the future holds, and any speculations I might make about it would be filled with enough virulent pessimism and fear to make them useless as experiments (but I at least might learn a little about what it is that I am fearful of).
2. I want to make things with clear and present needs in mind, because I think that is going to be an important skill to practise.
Begun: 5th March 2024
Updated: 5th March 2024