finger puppets


finger puppets, originally uploaded by aesop.

These here characters are part of my contribution to A-Mart, the art supermarket at Ale and Porter in Bradford-On_Avon. The opening will be at 6.30 on Friday, and there’ll be lots of stuff there from dozens of artists, including ceramics in the shape of ‘tupperware’ type plastic containers, t-shirts and stuff by Mark Pawson, and artists books by me and Melanie ward, amongst others, all set amidst the engagingly bizarre cerise colour scheme dreamed u for the occasion. I was quite keen on the sock puppets which will be available, though there’s also a range of pinhole camera-related stuff that looks good, too.

I was over there yesterday, having gotten a lift from Linda Clark, whose driving opened up a new chapter with this inter-town run, hooray. As always, everyone was very welcoming and sympathetic about my sore back. I’m in the wars again now, having managed to introduce a fragment of prawn cracker into the surroundings of my left eyeball, which swelled up a good deal. Sarah’s liberal application of ice in a selection of rubber gloves kindly supplied by viki seem to have done the trick and staved off a monocular future for a while, though I’m typing wit the affected eye still closed and a bit itchy-runny, but well within acceptable norms. ( I can see fine through it if anyone’s worried, though it still feels a bit crumby). Spoiled a game of scrabble that was shaping up to be enjoyably awful.

Patrick Moore


Patrick Moore, originally uploaded by aesop.

My favourire cyclopean astronomer.

moon drawing


moon drawing, originally uploaded by aesop.

A drawing I did some time ago, posted now in honour of this afternoon’s meeting at Spike Island to talk about integrating my book arts teaching into the taster class they are organising across-the-board in August. Also in honour of Howard Plotkin’s The Imagined World Made Real, a marvellous book that attempts to "marry the biological and social sciences". Fiercely attentive to critics that would accuse him of reductive reasoning that would throw the study of centuries of socil science, he sets out the landscape of these relationships and explanatory models with great emphasis on the detail and strangeness of culture. He’s equally attentive to the necessity of using the explanatory powers of science to understand culture. One would expect the usual criticisms to hold true: clumsy, reductive, overly rational. Not so.

Very provoking, opening avenues of inference and speculation deep into my own thought on artistic practice and media.