We recently took Dunlin Press to The Minories in Colchester for a pop-up, bringing our books, prints and other work into the gallery space. It also gave me the opportunity to show something I have been wanting to show for quite a while: my Stations lino prints.

I was delighted to finally do it.

Dunlin Press is an independent publisher and artist-led art project based in Wivenhoe, Essex, which Martin Bewick (MW Bewick) and I founded in 2015. Over the past decade, we have built a distinctive catalogue spanning poetry, prose, visual art and experimental writing, working with both emerging and established artists to create books, limited-edition pamphlets, prints and soundtracks.

It was lovely to bring that work into The Minories and, for me, particularly satisfying to see Stations lino cut prints occupying a gallery space.

Stations

Stations is a series of 16 hand-cut lino prints that sit somewhere between language and silence.

They take the Stations of the Cross as their starting point, but these are secular works. Rather than following a religious narrative, they turn towards the universal stations of human experience: vulnerability, suffering, endurance, compassion and those moments when the weight we carry becomes too much to bear alone.

The prints draw on asemic poetry and abstract mark-making. The marks look as though they should be read but they resist being read in any single or fixed way. They are gestures, fragments and traces. They remind me of memories that remain with us without ever becoming fully explainable.

The physical act of making them is important too. I hand-cut each lino strip. The incisions recall ancient tablets and marks carved into stone: records left behind, even when we no longer have the complete story of what they mean. There is something about the repetition of cutting into the lino that makes the process feel connected to the subject matter. The resulting prints hold traces of pain and uncertainty alongside endurance and strength, but nothing is resolved into a simple narrative.

Terrains of Love and Grief

Alongside Stations, we showed Terrains of Love and Grief, works made with ink and acrylic on builder’s paper.

The tough, robust industrial paper has been transformed through momigami, the Japanese practice of kneading and working paper to soften and alter its fibres.

For these pieces, I wanted the making to be physical. The large sheets were wrestled with, pierced and marked using my father’s carpenter’s chisels. There is something about using those tools that connects the work to memory, inheritance and making,  the marks becoming both physical and emotional traces.

The works evoke the landscape around Wivenhoe ferry marsh: reeds, mud, grasses, birdsong, changing light and the movement of the seasons.  The marsh became a place of refuge and restoration for me. Its cycles of growth, decay and renewal offered another way of thinking about loss and healing. Rather than seeing them as separate states, the landscape suggests that they are part of the same continuum.

These are remembered landscapes.  Places where personal grief and reflection meet the larger rhythms of the natural world.

Stations, performed

And then there was the performance.  If you missed us, you missed a vibe.

We performed Stations at The Minories, with Jo Morrison (pictured above) on voice, me doing live mark-making, and Martin layering guitar across his Stations soundtrack.

It was a joy.

The performance is built around the same themes as the prints: grief, loss, endurance, compassion, transformation, love and the thresholds of life and death.

Martin’s instrumental album was written and recorded specifically for the Stations project and provides the sonic foundation for the live performance. The album is available through the Dunlin Press Bandcamp page.

For the live version, the music, voice and mark-making unfold together in real time.  Jo’s vocalisation and song are improvised. Martin’s atmospheric sound develops around the performance. And I make asemic marks live. So although we have the structure of the Stations of the Cross as a starting point, the performance itself is never completely fixed.

The performance also made me realise again how much I enjoy collaboration. The Stations prints begin as a very solitary process,  sitting with the lino, making one cut at a time.

The performance completely changes that.  Martin and Jo bring their own interpretations of the themes of grief, loss and redemption.  Martin does it through wonderfully atmospheric music.  Jo does it through exquisitely powerful vocalisation. What a joy it is to work with these humans.

So while this is performance was a one-off, we’re hoping it’s not a one off performance and we can resurrect it somewhere, sometime, hopefully soon.

Thank you to everyone who came along, to The Minories for providing such an excellent setting, and to Jo and Martin for making the performance such a special experience.

I’m taking down the work for Gesture this Friday, so you’ve only got about more day to see it.

Gesture brings together myself and the wonderful Wendy Fransella at Level Best Gallery in Colchester, in a celebration of mark-making, colour and form.

Here’s Wendy with the show…

It is always a pleasure to show with Wendy, and I was particularly happy to have the opportunity to bring our work together again. Here’s her work below. 

Our practices are very different, but there is something lovely about the conversation that happens between them, the contrast between bold blocks of vivid colour and more sensitive layers of washes, marks and shifting tones.

And it is very good to be back at Level Best after a couple of years away. 

It is such a lovely space, made even better by the beautiful people who run it and make it feel like a genuinely welcoming place for artists and audiences.

If you’re in the Colchester area, do go and have a look.

The exhibition runs until 27 August, Monday–Friday, 8.30am–4.30pm, at Level Best Gallery, 26 St John’s Street, Colchester, Essex CO2 7HB.

The work

Alongside some previously exhibited work (see top image) I have made some paintings specifically for the show. These very recent paintings I have included in Gesture are part of my ongoing exploration of memory, place and the things that are difficult to hold onto.

I have been thinking a lot about memories of places, events and emotions that become increasingly intangible over time.

What happens to a memory when the physical place has changed, when the people who inhabited it are gone? What do we remember accurately, and what do we reconstruct? And perhaps most importantly, what do we do with the feelings that remain when the details begin to disappear?

There is a tension in these paintings between the things that feel vivid and the things that are already fading.

My recent paintings use an intentionally complementary colour palette inspired by the clothes, places of play and interiors I remember from my childhood. They are, in many ways, my ghosts of families and homes.

There is affection in them. Love and sadness.  I don’t want these paintings to become sentimental recreations of a childhood that never quite existed. Instead, I am trying to hold the contradictions.  The happiness alongside the hurt. The remembered moments of safety alongside the things that made me feel unsafe.  The people I loved alongside the complicated realities of who they were.

I am interested in the way memory edits and the way we layer new experiences over old ones. The way we can remember a feeling much more clearly than we can remember the circumstances that produced it.

The paintings are therefore not attempts to reconstruct the past accurately. And perhaps, most importantly, to offer compassion to the people I have become old enough to understand differently.

I can see the histories they carried, the things they didn’t know how to deal with, and the ways in which their own experiences shaped the lives around them. That doesn’t erase what happened.  But it does allow another perspective.  These paintings are my attempt to hold that complexity.

Messages across time

There are also hidden messages within the paintings. I have written obscured words to family members who are lost.  They sit beneath or within the layers, becoming part of the physical construction of the painting rather than something immediately available to the viewer.

An attempt to reach people who can no longer answer. Perhaps an attempt to say things that couldn’t be said at the time.

Perhaps simply a way of acknowledging that those relationships still exist somewhere within me. The words don’t necessarily need to be read. Their presence is enough.  They become another layer of memory. Another mark. 

Another gesture.

In March 2026, I took part in Common Host, a weekend of exhibitions, performances, conversation and gathering convened by artist zack mennell at Safehouse 1&2 in Peckham, as part of Future Ritual.  

I was in excellent company.

Common Host brought together artists responding in different ways to folklore, environmental degradation, industrial legacy and cultural inheritance. The programme was described as bringing ancient folk customs such as mumming into new relationships with the post-industrial landscapes of London and Essex. It was a wonderfully strange and fertile territory for my work.  

Future Ritual is a practice of gathering, curating and organising, working primarily with performance and other embodied practices. Its projects explore ideas around land and ecology, myth, belief, mystery, desire and grief, and create spaces for artists and audiences to think and feel through place and experience.  

That combination of place, material, ritual and transformation felt particularly relevant to my own practice.

For Common Host, I showed Future Relic, alongside a group of sculptural works called People’s Staffs.

Future Relic

Future Relic is a painting of sorts.

It is an imagined landscape,  or perhaps a fever dream or remembered landscape, of a place that has been occupied, used, scarred and then abandoned.

I had recently been asked by a regular Turps Banana mentor whether my paintings were landscapes.

I began to interrogate the idea of landscape a little more closely. If I do create landscapes, they are imagined ones. 

They are places made from memory, history, fragments, marks and materials. They carry traces of human occupation. They are scarred by graffiti, industry and intervention. They are places in which something has happened.

In Future Relic, I imagined an industrial landscape after the people have gone. Structures that once seemed permanent are beginning to dissolve. Rust, vegetation, water, weather and time are taking over. Infrastructure sags into wetlands. Architecture becomes part of the landscape rather than standing apart from it.

Industry is no longer a monument, it becomes compost.The landscape is not destroyed and then restored to some imagined pristine state. It changes. It absorbs what has happened to it. It carries the evidence. It becomes another layer.

The most important material decision I made was to drape painted tarpaulin over this landscape. I wanted to tell a story of abandonment and decay through something that had originally been designed to do the opposite.

Tarpaulin is protective.  It is used to cover things, contain things, keep things dry, cordon things off and protect people from the mess of construction and demolition.

It belongs to building sites, to temporary structures and to shelters.  To things that are not yet finished or have already begun to fall apart.

I was particularly drawn to the lightness of it. It is such an insubstantial material for something that is supposed to protect against the elements.

In Future Relic, the tarpaulin has outlived its original purpose. It has become torn, tattered and weathered. It no longer protects.

Instead, it hangs like a veil, shroud or well-used bandage.

I imagined it as something that had first been erected to keep people out, to prevent mess and control a construction site. Then, perhaps, as the structure collapsed, it was repurposed as shelter.  Now it hangs in tatters and has become a relic.

There is something about that transformation that feels very close to the way I think about landscape: materials and places continually acquiring new meanings as circumstances change.

The tarp also became an unexpected connection to folk traditions too. Its shredded strips started to remind me of the ragged costumes of mummers; figures associated with seasonal ritual, disguise, performance and the persistence of older belief systems.

What might a piece of tarpaulin mean in a hundred years? What happens when the infrastructure of our present becomes the folklore of the future?  Perhaps our temporary solutions become archaeological fragments and our industrial materials become sacred objects. Maybe the things we use to protect ourselves become part of the stories we tell about survival.

The work imagines a future in which emergency infrastructures have become ceremonial remnants, synthetic skins weathered by time and absorbed into ecological and cultural memory.

Making the work

I deliberately pared everything back for this painting.

That was quite a departure from my final TOMA piece, where I had thrown everything at the canvas — layers, materials, marks, interruptions, colour, collage and sculptural elements.  Future Relic felt different, more considered. 

The painting itself is relatively restrained, allowing the materials placed over it to do some of the work. The tarp is painted, torn and tattered before being draped over the canvas. It falls away from the surface, creating shadows and physical space between the painted landscape and the viewer. It becomes an object and a deliberate installation rather than a display piece. 

That was particularly important because I knew the work would be shown in a space where performances would be happening throughout the weekend. So I wanted the piece to be experiential that didn’t simply to sit on the wall and be looked at.  I wanted it to occupy the space.  To have a physical presence,  as though something had happened there.

The work changed in the space.  The falling tarp, the shadows and the slightly precarious quality of the installation made it feel much more like the thing I had imagined.  It became a landscape you encountered rather than simply a landscape you looked at.

The People’s Staffs

Alongside Future Relic, I showed a group of sculptural works called The People’s Staffs.

The staff has a long and complicated history. It can be a symbol of authority, protection, pilgrimage and connection to the land. It has been carried by kings, judges and military commanders as a visible expression of power.

I am interested in what happens when that symbolism is dismantled. What if the staff no longer represents authority over people but it represented collective strength instead?

The People’s Staffs reclaim the object as something communal rather than hierarchical. Each staff is made from found branches, already shaped by weather, rot or animal intervention. I then add sculpted paper, stained, wrapped and hand-painted elements. This paper wrinkles, tears and absorbs moisture. It kind of bruises.  So in these objects, authority is replaced by fragility.  

Reflections 

Showing the work as part of Common Host felt particularly appropriate because the weekend brought together contemporary art and older ideas about ritual, folklore and collective gathering.  The work already contained ideas about ritual and transformation, but placing it within Future Ritual programme, which also was actively exploring those ideas made those connections much more tangible.

The old Safehouse buildings in Peckham also became part of the work.  The venue is made up of old domestic spaces, imperfect and marked by time, rather than a neutral white gallery. Future Ritual itself describes the Safehouses as spaces evocative of decay, memory and tenacity.  That mattered as the work was not simply transported into a gallery but it encountered another building with its own history.  A place where the work could be looked at, walked around, encountered and, importantly, lived alongside for a while.