Multimedia and Film
Multimedia, film, collaborations, illustrations, and creative projects shaped through image, narrative and ideas.
My creative projects explore ideas that are difficult to contain within a single medium. Drawing together writing, illustration, editorial design, philosophy and visual storytelling, they investigate questions of imagination, culture, identity, justice and the ways in which stories shape our understanding of the world.
Some exist as books, others as essays, illustrated narratives, multimedia collaborations or experimental publications. Together they form an evolving body of work in which image, text and design become different ways of exploring the same deeper questions.
THE EPIC OF SIMIAN
Genre: Allegorical Film / Series of Concept Vignettes
Themes: Myth, identity, transformation and the modern city
Summary:
The Epic of Simian is a mythic narrative told through film, writing, music and illustration. Its episodes follow a young art student whose private imaginative world opens into a strange journey through contemporary London, ancient Uruk, secluded monasteries, collectors’ houses and visions of a city approaching transformation.
Part coming-of-age story, part metaphysical adventure, the work moves between the intimate and the monumental: alienation and ambition, psychic experience and ancient history, private fantasy and public myth. Images, voices and incidents surface like recovered fragments from a much larger story, inviting the viewer to assemble connections between them.
The trailer offers an entry into this dreamlike world—comic, ominous and continually shifting—where the boundaries between the modern city, the ancient past and the inner life begin to dissolve.
See trailer on Instagram - link forthcoming
Illustrations for Robert Lipscombe's THE ENGLISH PROJECT
Genre: Illustration · Pen and ink · Literary collaboration
Themes: Justice and corruption, Faustian bargains, living manuscripts and supernatural intrigue
Summary:
My illustrations for Robert Lipscombe’s The English Project were created as a parallel visual narrative to his darkly comic “novel in a newspaper.” Drawn principally in brown pen and ink, they bring together literary portraiture, caricature, architectural detail and visionary montage to evoke the book’s strange world of judges, writers, fiends, living pages and metaphysical intrigue.
Rather than illustrating individual scenes literally, I sought to give visual form to the atmosphere and underlying mythology of the novel. Characters emerge from dense fields of cross-hatching; ordinary settings become theatrical or ominous; and fragments of London, the courtroom and the supernatural world overlap as though gathered within the pages of a single elaborate manuscript.
The drawings reflect the work’s mixture of satire, moral seriousness and macabre fantasy. Seen together, they form a distinctive imagined world—at once recognisably English and increasingly uncanny—in which institutions, private grievances and supernatural forces become entangled.
See full page here – link forthcoming
Art Deco Piece
Genre: Short film · Moving imagery · Music · Visual narrative
Themes: A miniature film of desire and transformation
Summary:
Art Deco Piece is a short visual narrative combining moving imagery, and music. A solitary figure stands upon a geometric shore, gazing out to sea; a woman passes mysteriously through the sky; and within the shadowed interior of a Roman café, memory, desire and imagination gather around an almost-empty glass of wine.
The film unfolds through a sequence of charged visual emblems rather than conventional explanation. Art Deco geometry, sacred architecture, mechanical forms and dreamlike transitions create a private mythology of attraction, danger, repression and release.
In its closing images, the severe pattern of the opening landscape has disappeared. The two figures walk together beside the sea, suggesting an escape from inherited structures and the possibility of a relationship founded upon recognition and equality.
See on Instagram - link forthcoming
MASTERS OF THE
YOU-NIVERSE
Genre: Moving image · Music · Visual montage · Psychological symbolism
Themes: A hall of mirrors, a labyrinth of inheritance
Summary:
Masters of the You-niverse is a hypnotic visual film in which a man wanders through a private cosmos of mirrors, masks and recurring moons. Wherever he turns, his own image returns to meet him—multiplied, distorted and at times strangely mechanical—as though the world itself has become an extension of his inner life.
Beneath the surface runs the suggestion of an older labyrinth. A beast waits somewhere within it; childhood and memory overlap; and inherited fears take on mythic form. When the protagonist passes through the mirror, entering the reflected world rather than merely observing it, the film begins to move from repetition towards recognition. Masks fracture, rigid identities loosen, and the pull of the moon gradually gives way to a more human presence.
Shifting between dreamlike imagery, distressed archival textures and the romance of the silver screen, the film traces an oblique passage through family, masculinity and the possibility of reconciliation. Its final kiss feels less like a conventional ending than an arrival: the moment at which the protagonist steps beyond the closed circuit of the You-niverse and becomes capable of meeting another person.
See in Instagram - link forthcoming
Genre: Youthful Manifesto / Catalogue and Non-sequitars
Themes: Art, self, power, beauty
Summary:
Fragments of a Forgotten Manifesto
Fragments of a forgotten manifesto, New Age Heroes grew out of the first years of art school, when Borian Lazarov and Ed Mirza discovered a shared commitment to linear draftsmanship, figurative art and the expressive integrity of the drawn line. Developing across loose sheets, drawings, photographs, notebooks, photocopies and early word-processed texts, it became part sketchbook, part correspondence, part manifesto and part autobiographical narrative.
Drawing and Artistic Tradition
At the centre of the project was a belief in the directness of drawing. Borian and Ed were particularly drawn to art in which the line remained visible, searching and alive—looking towards Italianate figurative traditions as well as the economy and precision associated with Japanese and Chinese drawing.
This enthusiasm also became a way of questioning the conceptual orthodoxies they encountered at art school. However youthful or combative some of those arguments now appear, they arose from a sincere concern that technical accomplishment, beauty and sustained observation should not be dismissed as culturally obsolete.
An Attempt at a System of Ideals
The eight-part diagram associated with the project brought together the words Positivity, Order, Knowledge, Labour, Love, Hope, Wisdom and Bravery. It represented an ambitious—and perhaps characteristically youthful—attempt to transform uncertainty into a coherent system of values.
Throughout the archive, private experience repeatedly expands into theory. Reflections on identity, self-presentation, authority, family and artistic vocation become intertwined with broader arguments about culture and society.
An Attempt at a System of Ideals
The project also records an intense period of friendship and creative exchange. Borian and Ed drew together, discussed art and developed closely related figurative styles, sometimes making it difficult to distinguish where one person’s visual language ended and the other’s began.
Their Norwegian friend Tore, another presence at the Byam Shaw, also belongs to this history. His appearance and personality later contributed to the fictional character Hans Boucher in Simian.
A Retrospective View
Seen from a distance, New Age Heroes is a record of formation. It is passionate, self-conscious, contradictory and occasionally naïve—but also heartfelt, inventive and sustained by a genuine belief in drawing, friendship and the possibility of constructing a meaningful life through art.
This presentation draws together the surviving archive, with drawings, photographs, collaborative texts and other materials.
Read the full book - link forthcoming