CRAFTIST

I am not quite an artist and not quite a craftsperson but I enjoy making as an activity that brings together my ideas and beliefs, practical skills and aesthetic inkling in a new form. Even with a poor vision and a limited talent, I continue to be amazed at how creative practice, as an unending conversation with the world, brings new ideas, things and depth into existence. Here, I share some of the stuff I make on my own and with others.

The filmpoem ‘Lines of Flight’ is an outcome of an ongoing conversation/collaboration with Emily Wilkinson about belonging, journeying and finding home in a changing world. It originated in my scribblings about Lines of flight in a time of endings and grew from the invitation Emily received to the 2014 Filmpoem Festival in Antwerp. It has also featured on the Dark Mountain blog along with some reflections on the process of making this together.

Since I first started reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Book of Hours’ different fragments of melody have suggested themselves to me when reading these poems. Over the last couple of years I have transformed some of these words and melodies into sketches for songs (at various stages of maturity). Where they come from I don’t quite know and, learning as I go along, I’m not sure where they are going either but the whole thing is much too enjoyable not to go anywhere at all. You can also find the songs with the original text here.

A couple of years ago I was part of a brief experiment with a group of people who were sharing music on a monthly basis. I’ve kept on making mixtapes of stuff I listen to from time to time. Feel free to listen in, it’s pretty eclectic (link opens in a new window).

Feel free to mashup, remix or reuse stuff on this page – just give me a shout if you do.

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Filming the footage for ‘Lines of Flight’ gave me a new way of seeing the area I live in and set in motion a search for cinematic expressions of some of the topics I’m exploring. Below you can find examples of stuff I look at. I’m still experimenting with the medium of filmpoetry so if anything draws you in, write about it and let me know!

I like the kind of happenings that make you stop and wonder about our normal ways of seeing things, from the subtle and subversive interventions of street art to the immersive virtual realities of performances and installations. Månefiskeren and the Heart-Mind Computer are examples of two happenings I’ve been involved in at either end of that spectrum. Månefiskeren was a stencil puzzle created with Morten Svenstrup which, if you could crack the code, would lead you to a treasure buried ‘underground’ in a library archive in Holstebro (link opens in a new window).

The Heart-Mind Computer is an interactive experiment in connecting spectator's thoughts and feelings with a range of themes linked to the environment. It takes spectators on a journey through their ‘heart-mind plane’ and different interactive installations about environmental problematics. Below you’ll find a link to some documentation of its making – there’s also a short video from when the Heart-Mind Computer ran at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (link opens in new window).

Having lived a semi-nomadic life for a long time, I began wondering about the red threads of my life. By creating a visual representation of different events of my life I stumbled upon the ‘time mandala’ which is a way of discovering some of those connections in life that are easy to miss when we think about time as linear (link opens in a new window).

The pointed focus and visual constraints that a camera imposes on perception draw me and frustrate me in equal measures. I’m in no way an accomplished photographer but I like to find and frame images. These are some of the pictures I’ve found – they are, with a few exceptions, completely unmanipulated.