Gone to ground

In April, I went to Venice. My first trip out of the UK since the South India trip in 2013. The image above was made while I was there, awash with impressions...

It reminded me how much I, as a solitary worker, need input, if I'm to keep working. And for some reason the input has to come from beyond my normal, everyday geographical and cultural environment. It's always been this way.

The first image I made after coming back was this one, which for some reason received a title:


'Foxy was indeed delighted to be in Venice'

The next day, I made another:

And then I hit a period of insomnia, which seems to be, amongst other things, challenging me to completely reframe the way I work.

I'm holding off from my usual responses, the ones which made the images above.  Instead I'm exposing myself to fragments of Venice, and just sitting in the midst of them. I've not been posting about this process, because it's a process, and I want it to be in some way private.

This is an interesting impulse in a world of social media, and particularly for me, who refuses to engage in gallery showing or regular exhibition creation. Without social media, my images are unseen. I make for myself, but in the end, what I make is my gift to the world - it wants to be seen.

But now I need to explore what happens when what I make is not immediately shared. Not because I make to share, but because I want to immerse myself in a different kind of process.

For the moment I'll only be sending occasional dispatches from the underworld. I don't fully understand why I even want to send occasional dispatches, but it's something to do with keeping an oxygen line to the surface as I go down.