Besides being my time travel companions, the gracefully ageing books that occupy a little wall in my studio, with their dusty labyrinths of words and secret notes pressed between their pages, often have me wondering if they hide more than they reveal. Perhaps best cherished the way they are, but in some strange way, a channel of communication seems to open up when I marry their pages to photographs, which I like to do by way of image transfers. A simple, gentle process of scratching and peeling at the brittle fibres yields itself to pathways of hidden landscapes and fragments of my own ghosts that have slipped through my fingers. The tactile alchemy of all the unconnectedness merging together to unravel stories within the stories, poems within the poems, and thoughts within the thoughts hints at the likes of magic mazes in secret gardens and back alleys of time tainted surfaces waiting to be unearthed, or just be lost in.

 

Xylene transfers on old paper.