The Downs is a shortened version of the name given to the landscape near my home, site of various projects since 2015 when I used a Tumblr account – SLWRNR – to log 100 runs around the Downs in descriptions of exactly 100 words. These reports became the book A Downland Index (2016) designed by Colin Sackett at uniformbooks. The Makina Books publication Night Blooms attends to a smaller sample of the Downs, reconnoitring night-time flowers in text and photography. An even tighter focus was chosen for Mirrors, a self-published exploration designed by Emily of Stanley James Press of my obsession with one particular dewpond, some five miles from my front door.
In 2025, I returned to the same dewpond with the mixed media assemblage “Props for a Sky Mirror Bureau” as part of the “dew- mist- cloud- fog-” exhibition at the Marine Workshops Newhaven. “Props for a Sky Mirror” features “a journal, embroidered patch, photographs, neon hoops, hand-drawn GPS routes, OS Map excerpt, video loop on iPad (4:44), field recordings on radios (6:17), calendar, chalk rocks & ephemera (books and post-cards)” and is shown alongside works by Emma Lindsay and Alison Bettles, all exploring different process-orientated ways to engage with the local landscape feature of the dewpond.
