I play with text, images, and narrative. Work often manifests as low-cost publications, short moving pieces and/or web-based objects.

I’ve long been obsessed with language, value systems, and our Western insistence that language and we exist outside and separate from matter, which makes no sense to me whatsoever, in part, perhaps, due to training as an actor in the early 90s – the more physically we worked, the truer our spoken texts would seem. In the framework I subscribe to, language (what we say) and material (bodies that say stuff) are fundamentally intertwined, separated mainly by an habitual desire to categorise aspects of life, then apply value to different realms. Machine-learning (ML) processes enter my work, along with photography, scribbles and digital doodles, since it too is a manifestation of the reality of which we are a part, and shouldn’t be ignored or dismissed. I also play with other media (tools, extensions, reverberations of movement), including paper, text, archive, family and found albums, speech and audio, to name a few others.

As we live through a linguistic/techno/scientific revolution, we fear all, including ourselves, will be reduced to a soup of undifferentiated slop. This fear seems to leave us feeling untethered, prone to paranoia and, at times, apparently resistant to reason (Kornbluh, 2023). But it also invites experimentation, allowing us to address systems and modalities that are demanding to be overturned and/or reconfigured. Or are being overturned and reconfigured despite protestations, some extremely violent. Straight dichotomies that many took for granted no longer look so certain, regardless of voices insisting on the opposite. In a universe underpinned by digital ‘scribing’ systems, ancient absence and presence are usurped by pattern, coherence <-> decoherence, and movement. As such, my work addresses the potentials and risks of these shifts. It is neither practice- nor theory-led, which remains in the realm of ‘either/or’ logic that has long seemed sensible and fair to many, but which arguably needs supplanting to match the more fluid, less binary framework that our post-industrial, post-Cartesian paradigm is ushering in, but which is in so much conflict with what remains.

Paradox and Influences

I am particularly interested in how the rejection of one binary is often met with yet another, frequently, as far as I have noticed, with a complete lack of awareness of the irony. Voices insist that some supposedly ‘new’ binary is the solution, the saviour even – practice over theory being a prime example. For some time, I felt alone in my puzzlement over this, but have recently been heartened to notice more and more corners of academia grappling with this problem – philosopher Vicky Kirby being key among them. However, I also see entrenchment and resistance from the very places one might expect otherwise.

The inquiries on these pages are examples of ongoing, entangled, embodied discovery that come about through obsessions with the feminine and contemporary media’s influence, constitution or destruction (often simultaneous) of our world. I aim to celebrate and exploit the dissolution of entrenched binaries and dualisms within a symbolic realm that feels dangerously unstable and/or wonderfully fluid, depending on your point of view and tolerance for multiple opposing tensions and/or acceptance of ‘superposition’*. However, I also acknowledge and worry about resulting instability and loss of collective ground, even though much of that ground can seem redundant, if not antediluvian to some. As I work through paradoxes and philosophical conundrums, I do my utmost to avoid negative nostalgia, nihilism and sanctimony, holding on to empathy for all I’m worth. (Of course, I frequently fail. Nevertheless, empathy and a commitment to pluralism, underpinned by dialogue and listening, sit at the core of my project. Listening sometimes entails hearing, not to what is voiced, but to what isn’t.)

Influenced by Maya Deren’s call to discover a new language for film in the 1930s and 40s, in the 21st century, I embrace an expanded definition of ‘the image’, encompassing optical, sonic, and haptic elements (Nail, 2019), as I look to discover in my own work and work by others a new language for complex, dynamic, recursive technologies. I categorically reject accepted media hierarchies. Poetry can be made with anything, even shit. So far, I’ve avoided literal shit but will mix various materials – from tinfoil, film, and textiles to ML-generated content and organic matter – while rejecting received wisdom about the value of this or that medium over another. This results in projects that aim to traipse across and through boundaries, manifesting simultaneously in print, online, or installation, with image, text and performance. Nevertheless, I heed Hannah Arendt’s warning in Truth and Politics: beware of images made in the mechanised (and now automated) world, however they come into being.

*A term borrowed from quantum mechanics by François Laruelle and subsequently Katarina Kolozova to describe the way opposing forces can exist together while transforming each other, i.e. deeply entangled.


Books/articles that inform the work: 

Arendt, H. (1968). ‘Truth and Politics’, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Enlarged edition. New York: Viking Press, pp. 227-264.

Buber, M. (2002). Between Man and Man. Translated by R. G. Smith. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203220092.

Deren, M. (1946). An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. New York: The Alicat Book Shop Press.

Gamble, C.N., Hanan, J.S. and Nail, T. (2019) ‘WHAT IS NEW MATERIALISM?’, Angelaki, 24(6), pp. 111–134. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1684704.

Hayles, N.K. (2017) Unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago (Ill.): University of Chicago Press.

Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kirby, V. (2011). Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Kolozova, K. (2017). ‘Philosophy as capitalism and the socialist radically metaphysical response to it’, Labyrinth, 19(2), pp. 57–66.

Kornbluh, A. (2023) Immediacy, or The style of too late capitalism. London New York: Verso.

Nail, T. (2019). Theory of the Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press.