Multi-media projects 2016 - 2026
MauMau Blood Dreams 2025 rewrites fairytale narrative for an uncertain future.
I found old Portuguese folktales at a government website by accident. They are shocking, brutal stories. Soon after I became aware of the tattooed rocks in Valença, Portugal, a landscape of neolithic Atlantic Art near where I lived. The designs carved in rock are the first stories, about animals, events, hunters and warriors. The images ware mixed in with psychedelic designs, like entoptic symbols wired in the brain in shamanic drug trance. The rock art became Bronze Age word of mouth folktales, rewritten in the 17th century as fairytales for sophisticated audiences. The stylish, dream-like fairytale with a happy ending is deceptively fluffy, transforming desire and dream in fantasy. Clearly we have been telling ourselves the same stories for a long time. I decided to cut up tales, blur, mix-up roles and outcomes to suggest new narrative for an uncertain future.
WORKS
MauMau Blood Dreams postcards
FILM
Moon is a Dagger
Bazar Magico
Sharqui Tree
Beast
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
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
Series of 4 prints on linen
FILM
My Bot Dancing 2the End
There is Void
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
Magic Dream
Nomad Dreams, the Sorceress, the Flying Saucer and the Moon
DreamTown USA
Dream Come True
SpaceLife Dreams
WORKS:
Oracle Books
I Have Known Rivers watercolors
Shaman Trees photographs
Love Fugitive 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. The vacation migration is compared 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.
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.