MauMau Blood Dreams 2026. We are so accustomed to the creation of fantasy fairytale of everything in our lives, from the perfectly curated home, our daydream-life goals, the branded politician, to ´beautiful´ people with fantasy lives followed on instagram, magical video world games, cosplay, avant-garde fashion, that it is shocking to learn the basis of the fairytale story. It is bloodlust, war, the hunt for food in which a lot of blood is spilled, the more the better, incest, cannibalism, power grab coups of kidnap and rape, and territorial gain through the spillage of more blood. 

This is why I called this project MauMau Blood Dreams. Mau means bad in Portuguese. (But I also draw from the word MauMau, as in the rebellion in Kenya. There are debates over this name. But the presence of Portuguese traders on that coast since 1400´s leads me to this. MauMau has evolved to mean terrorising. Which is what primitive man perfected, under the direction of his shaman.)

In researching this project I found myself led by life as in all my projects. It followed a serendipitous synchronicity. In a series of events I did not understand until later. I visited the museum of Pontevedra, Spain on my first trip to this area. And sketched the designs on the carved rocks removed from their environment. Later, I found old Portuguese folktales by accident in a government archive online, and became aware of the landscape filled with tattooed rocks in Valença, Portugal. Checking the fairly recent papers written about Valença´s rock designs, I learned they are associated with Bronze Age word of mouth folktales. In the 17th century, the folktales were rewritten as fairytales for sophisticated audiences. And fairytales always have a happy ending. I decided to cut up tales, blur, mix-up roles and outcomes to suggest new narratives for our own uncertain future. Because clearly we have been telling ourselves the same stories for a long time.

I happened to move into two important environments by chance. Temporarily into a rock ‘village’ house in Navais thinking I could inhabit a different mind set, a perspective shaped by my surroundings. The house was in the middle of a protected Masseira agricultural zone managed and recorded by local monks since the 1200´s. In this landscape of manmade shallow depressions, microclimates were created for a variety of vegetables and fruits. The single family plots were beautiful, fairytale gardens. The day that the Portugal government texted a severe weather warning for the worst storm in decades, a single deafening thunderclap announced its arrival at almost precisely midnight. I really wasn’t certain if the devil would appear or the house struck by lightening. I did not sleep and found myself living through one of Portugal´s worst winter storms. I came to view this house as an aware entity. The rocks held stories, memories, moods, desires, that they were not inert matter but living, sentient ‘relatives’ 

And I moved into an apartment in Lanhelas, close to Neolithic carved rocks in the bushes nearby. It was there I realised, staring at the undocumented rock designs, that they may be markers or maps. That they might explain the artists´ consciousness, in an 'enchanted' world that was slipping away. 

This is an important point. The rock designs told the first stories in a time when animals and men were companions. They lived in a landscape that bewitched them, a new and fantastical world. The animals were painted in caves, carved on rocks, depicted with love, and such devotion that the works are a religious experience. Later in story, animals were given a voice in folktale and fable. They converse, give advice, and aid the hero. Sometimes they are gods or vehicles for gods, or the hero in disguise, or enchanted, or under spells. The descendants of the magic animal are animated cartoon animals and super heroes that adapt animal abilities as their power. It is common to describe to describe impressive people with animal-like qualities, such as feline, wolflike, vulpine, foxy, bovine, like a bull, leonine, snaky.

I am struck by this paragraph by Portuguese artist Andre Príncipe.

“A myth is a story from the time when men and animals had no difference. To live in a shared land with other species with whom we cannot communicate is the most tragic, the most offensive, fault to the human heart and soul. Myths refuse to accept that condition as original.” Anima – Encounters with wild animals in Portugal. https://www.pierrevonkleist.com/products/anima-encounters-with-wild-animals-in-portugal

"The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul," Joseph Campbell.

"...and I’d love to be able to reshape a myth so that it feels as though the myth has always been like that." Virginie Despentes

Portuguese artist Paula Rigo's insight into the Portuguese folktale. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FIrwbIirVus

Alexander Kluge, "Human beings are not interested in reality. They can't be; it's the human essence. They have wishes. These wishes are strictly opposed to any ugly form of reality. They prefer to lie than to become divorced from their wishes...[they] forget everything and can give up everything except this principle of misunderstanding reality, the subjective."

WORKS

MauMau Blood Dreams postcards

FILM

Moon is a Dagger

Bad Wolf

Demon Springs

Bazar Magico

Sharqui Tree

Beast

SheShells

Cold Mountain 2024 contemplates human relationships with the natural environment. The title is attributed to the legendary Tang era (618–907) Dao-poets Shide and Han Shan. Poet Gary Snyder’s 1950’s translations of selected Cold Mountain poems, and characterisation of the hermits, are depicted in Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums. 

FILM

Cold Mountain Moon

Hunters Heart

Surfers Soul

Farmers World

A*str0P00L 2023 asks, 'Are we ready?´ Can we accept varied life forms, challenges to belief, perception, space travel and colonial behaviour, and adapt to transhumanism, and artificial consciousness designed within our bodies? This series of speculative, humorous and poetic films is composed with clips from early sci-fi movies.

WORKS

Shinzo Co-Star, gif-book

Null (result) &Void, gif-book

Series of 4 prints on linen

FILM

No One Speaks of Lorette

My Bot Dancing 2the End

There is Void

Time is Untape

Friday Night

Cornflakes Hullabaloo

Hinchinarfer

Planet of Dreams 2022 proposes radical alternative, dream-based practices of stewardship for the future of humanity and earth and solar system commons. And, as a way to develop self knowledge and critical thinking in an age of increasing planetary crisis and cosmic consciousness. 

FILM

Goose Moon Owl

Nuclear Forest

Wolf Queen

Magic Dream

Nomad Dreams, the Sorceress, the Flying Saucer and the Moon

Last Time Tomorrow

DreamTown USA

Dream Come True

SpaceLife Dreams

WORKS:

Oracle Books

I Have Known Rivers watercolors

Shaman Trees photographs

Love Fugitif 2021. Nine haiku films, made in response to the dystopic year of the covid virus, examine the only constant in our life, love. 

WatchFiends: 100 seconds to midnight 2020, reflects on challenges humanity faces in six short films. From plague, weather instability, AI surveillance, ethics and choice, apocalypse, space mining and migration. The title ‘WatchFiends’ is a line from Blake: ‘What the Watchfiends cannot find.’ With Jeff Crouch.

Club Paradise 2019 examines vacation culture, consciousness and capitalism. Working as a waiter on Cape Cod I experienced the vacation migration through the seasons...I compare it to early nomadic tribes led by their shaman on the tracks of game. But now, the game pursued is a state of mind advanced by corporate interests to produce a workers' consciousness tolerant of capitalist slavery. It is difficult to accept the ´vacation behaviour´ consciousness created by powerful advertising propaganda.

FILM

Welcome

Moon on Fire Meditation

Race the Sun Meditation

Last Exit

Cabo Peligro

Tears in the Night

Club Paradise

WORKS

Postcards with Rafael Gonzalez, Jeff Crouch

Cruise Collection, t-shirts

Tourist Fun, photography

Trouble in Club Paradise, polaroids

Blue Souvenir, cyanotype prints

Drone Drama: Music for the Dead 2016 asks, ‘What is it to be human in the age of the drone?’ in a collaboration between filmmaker Cecelia Chapman and composer Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt. Chapman's interpretation of Marquardt’s titles of eleven chapters question the militarization and commodification of knowledge, and the friction between technology corporations and local communities on the San Francisco Peninsula.