Far and Near … Alas the Tropic

Soon after I'd left Art School I used to try and think of works that circled the whole Earth. One notion was to journey with a radio set to a fixed wave band and record what it picked up as I travelled. Another I can't completely recall was to do with clocks, well time really. I would land at an airport and ask a stranger the time; photographs of these events would be a record used for the work along with the time and location. Another involved City Squares; I would lay out a fold up wooden square yard and photograph it then sweep the area and take another photograph … I think I was going to keep the sweepings but like the other works memory it's all a bit vague.

Years later I spotted a whole page advertisement for Westminster Banks around the globe and used them to initiate a work; I drifted into the doldrums around that time and gave the incomplete work to my niece Hannah then completely forgot about it. Close on forty years later my niece had my old work made into a book (Near and Far) for my eightieth birthday present. Her gift (what a thoughtful delight) reminded me of another unfinished work that spelt out 'Alas the Tropic of Capricorn' onto cut out 'map rectangles'.

One could easily claim from all those years ago that I was concerned with global warming or mankind's destructive instinct but I doubt it. What then was in my mind I wonder? I certainly remember the doldrums and that hanging onto working days kept me going by the thinnest of threads. As with the 'burning of my old prints', I feel a twitch of some sort or another very different from one brought about by an old photograph. So here they are with cracked Letraset on a wee line from an old map.

Letters in envelopes are different from electronic messaging; these ones are both fact and fiction and best read in order. Some are addressed to people from history as some from my past. Either way, by publishing these letters they have now become reality.

My sincere thanks to Richard Sercombe who is a wonder of the computer age and controls "the Adobe' rather than, as with myself it seems, the other way round. This work which I have loved making in memory of my two friends would not be here without him. There are other people to thank, some in the work that I have spoken to; others who are also in there, will never know they have been included but I'd still like to thank them.