Cantos-Open Horizons is part one of a text-based artwork which takes visual art notebooks collected between 2014 and 2024 as found text, reframed and rewritten in the style of 'The Cantos of Ezra Pound' as an epic, non-rhyming, stream-of-consciousness, prose poem, where thought processes are explored revealing a kind of creative self-portrait or fragmentary thought diary. The work reads like a journal exploring ideas about creating, aesthetics, art, painting, expression, philosophy, climate change, being, politics and representation through times of inspiration, self-doubt, grief and trauma as part of my pan-disciplinary art practice. Cantos-Open Horizons traces ideas through the development of the Horizons painting project and includes The Cosmic Handbook (page 104), a guide to accidental transcendentalism. The notebooks were started in 2014 as a dialogue with poet Derek Mahon and continued after he died in 2020.

This work was conceived as a visual document, where layout and font are integral to the concept, comprising short paragraphs, sentences, lists and quotes. The idea for this work came about after reading 'Uncreative Writing Managing Language in the Digital Age', Columbia University Press, 2011, by Kenneth Goldsmith. Derek’s copy of Joseph Joubert has kept me company, and Lydia Davis’s 'Essays' have constantly inspired me throughout the process. It is 22,280 words (126 pages).

Also, see Artwork Horizons 2014-24 and Solipsism Series 2013-15