My Approach
I am a Simulist writer, photographer, and maker of spaces.
My work begins in simultaneity and stays there: comic and tragic, sacred and profane, real and unreal. I let them stand, shimmer, argue, and trip over their own feet, get up again, and dance.
Simulism believes that objective truth beyond the hard physical reality of the universe cannot be found and that true human meaning lies in our compulsion to seek meaning, even though such a search will never reach more than a provisional outcome. It is in that search that humans beings can find joy, insight and fulfilment. That may sound like philosophy, and you can dive as deep as you like into that on the Ideas page — podcast, essays, the lot. There is an article about Simulism and a guide for young people.
I’m not here to be a philosopher. I’m here to make things. Words, images, gardens. That’s where ideas stop being theory and start being alive.
The Nexus
Feste said: “Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun.”
Braque said that he and Picasso climbed the summit of Cubism “like mountaineers roped together.”
Marushima Hideo said:
”I see the whole world in a tiny stone.”
「私は小さな石の中に全世界を見る。」
Vonegut said
“…it’s like we are not supposed to dance anymore.”
…Kurt, lets boogie.
A fusion of these ideas unify the disciplines in which I work.
By shining a light, we find understanding: sometimes the profound, sometimes the absurd.
Through making art, we invite others to look too. That shared gaze is a collaborative act; a mountain tackled together. It is the shared ascent that grants the view; not the summit shrouded in cloud.
And daylight reveals both the cracks and the magic in the smallest, most surprising places and things.
Wonder and fun, questions not answers.
My Writing
When I write fiction I use satire to show the cracks, and myth to reveal the power of humanity to dream.
Through this, the reader is permitted to dream too. That dream, and what we make of it, is life itself. Despite our never-ending folly, that dream is always precious.
It is what it is to be human — with (and until sans) everything.
In my poetry, the ephemeral resonates with significance. I invite readers to look at the smallest details of life and the meanings we lay on the discarded: trivial things, transitory places, fleeting memories: Harshly, things without value or meaning, humanely, that in which we seek out the significance our lives.
My Photography
In photography, I am an enchanter of images.
What I mean by that, and how my images fit into my philosophy — and the thinkers and artists above — should not precede their viewing. The visual must be allowed to speak as it does for every infant, before words: Otherwise, there is no enchantment.
Each image begins as a photograph, a record of what I saw and thought I saw, then melted and reformed until the viewer can find what they see. Suffice to say, I invite the viewer to rope up with the artist in the meaning-filled act of seeking significance.
My Garden
I am also a garden alchemist.
My garden invites visitors on a similar journey, but with a different resonance.
The rock is hard physicality; the plants grow by their own mechanisms.
Yet they are placed and pruned — arranged to invite many pareidolic encounters at both macro and micro scale.
My garden invites not one dream but many — each a reflection of the dreamer.
The rest is silence.
This is what isn’t the rest.
Someone once said, “we are such stuff that dreams are made on”. I’m not smart enough to say something like that.
But elsewhere, Shakespeare had Feste, my patron saint, say, “I’m not her fool, just her corrupter of words”. I am for giving that a go.
If you want to read what a fool looks like, hear my ideas.
But before you seek such corruption, see what it looks like in practice: through my writing, images, and garden.
About Me
In the 1990s I studied English at the University of Oxford, where I won the Violet Vaughan Morgan Prize, and later gained a First in Script Writing at the Oxford University Creative Writing Summer School.
My photographic work has been exhibited widely and recognised internationally. In 2009 I was a Section Winner in Digital Camera Photographer of the Year — at that time the world’s largest photography competition, with more than 20,000 entries. This helped lead to shows in Melbourne and distinctive galleries in the UK.
I am also the author of From the Marches to the Sea, a dual-language book of words and images exploring Mid-Wales, from border to coast.
After many years in the Cotswolds, I now live in the Welsh Marches, inspired by my Japonaiserie garden Where the Whale Talks to the Stars. From my studio there, I continue to write and produce digital imagery, and to collaborate with other artists.
There are two other honours I should mention. One is that, aged eight, I was awarded a Silver Blue Peter badge — an achievement impossible to surpass. (Well, they’re hardly going to give me a gold one, are they?)
In 2009 I was awarded the Silver Atenier Medal by Technische Universität Darmstadt for my contribution to educational philanthropy worldwide. It recognised leadership in professional development, public speaking, media work, education and training that helped more than half a million people give to education for the first time.
I suppose I’ve spent 100 per cent of my life chasing meaning and at least 200 per cent trying to remember where I left it. Maybe it’s with my maths book?
Or maybe it’s fallen down the back of the sofa? That’s where everything else ends up. Down the back of the sofa — a metaphor for life?
Stuffed behind the cushions… peeking out at Doctor Who, just the same.
You’ll find these same tensions — humour and seriousness, invention and reality — across my writing, images, and the garden that ties them together…