FABLES

Streetwise Opera is an amazing organisation that stages professional operas performed by people who have experienced homelessness. They recently commissioned me to create 4 x images for their upcoming winter production FABLES. The four fables are The Boy Who Cried Wolf, Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale & The Rose, Hey! Come On Out! by Shinichi Hoshi, and the story of The Hartlepool Monkey. The performances are to be filmed and screened as the highlight of this winter's Shoreditch Music Festival.

Dance clip 3

Dance clip 2

Dance clip 1

New work

This new painting is a sort of follow up to the Cyclists painting from a couple of years back.

My Ideal (Surreal) Home Exhibition

The Surreal House at the Barbican is a fantastic show - filled with things I absolutely love. The visitor wanders through a maze of specially-constructed rooms (Mad Love, Blasted Architecture, A Home for Birds) which are packed with surrealist treats, familiar and new. Some of the stand outs for me were Joseph Cornell's boxes, Man Ray's tiny photographs of Antoni Gaudi's buildings in Barcelona, Dali's Sleep and Magritte's Lovers (what a painting!), Robert Longo's massive drawings of Freud's apartment, and the Louis Bourgeois marble figure with a house for a head Femme Maison.

The show makes fasnicating connections between seemingly unrelated exhibits: I found out that Edward's Hopper's painting House by a Railroad was the model for the house in Psycho, and also 0001 Cemetery Lane, the house where the Addams Family lived in the 60s TV show.

The exhibition is great for film lovers. They are showing two typically brilliant Švankmajer shorts (Jaberwocky and Down to the Cellar), the amazing Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill Jr., and great clips from Godard's Le Mépris and Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice.

Best of all, there's a mini-cinema called the Electric Palace screening Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête - possibly the most magical and mysterious film ever made, and my all time favourite.

Spooky, sexy, mind-boggling and clever, The Surreal House succeeds in showing how the darkest sides of human nature and desire continue to inspire really profound, haunting, and exciting work. So don't miss it!