I was very moved by this open letter. It’s not often you feel that a talk you gave or paper you wrote really connected with anyone. I feel very welcomed by The Blake Society, and I really think many people of different cultural and faith background throughout the Asia-Pacific would enjoy Blake’s ideas and find gems of thoughts very aligned with Eastern spiritual mythologies and cultures.

Soldiers & civilians both share secret lives of superstition and they often carry material objects for ‘luck’ and protection during life’s challenging moments. Building on my rustic War and Peace 2023 amulets, these 2 new designs are high-fire colour glazed using WA stoneware clay & come with each 2024 giclée limited edition print orders for ‘Love in a Cold Climate’ & ‘Crooked Roads’.

My visual essay comes out when The Blake Society’s launches issue 4 of its journal VALA in London on November 29th, 2023 (Blake’s birthday is the 28th). With encouragement from VALA’s Editor, I decided five months ago to finally create a shop on my website to sell my art (& especially my VALA prints) direct from my studio.

In 2022 I was invited to provide an oral history for the State Library of Western Australia’s LGBTIQ+ history project. We kept having to put it off, so it was really good to finally film that in June 2023 this year. I was interviewed by Helena Cohen-Robertson of Know Your Nation inside the auditorium of the State Library and the final video and transcript can be accessed through the Library’s online catalogue along with other individuals also interviewed for their Community and Connections: LGBTQIA+ stories in Western Australia.

This is a digitised visual diary entry I made in 2005 and later used in my paintings for a solo exhibition called The Assassination of Judy Garland back in 2013. I have a lot of sketches and studies which never seen to see the light of day, and I’m turning them into prints in some cases, or adding them into my studies of the present. This one was scribbled Energize Mr Ellis on a print I found in one of my files. It was about fragmenting materiality, or disintegration such as dropping something in an acid bath, in this case, myths of American exceptionalism…

These are some early details from a series of works I’m working on concurrently in 2022. Anticlockwise from this top left and beneath, details from two canvases which started as a long 3 metre triptych (but I ran out of puff sorry). First one is called “Made in Taiwan”; the second is called “Supernature”. They are inspired by music from the late 70s. During the lockdowns I was listening to a lot of 70s Euro disco.