I have a collaboration with my good friend Laura Cole, pianist, composer and poet.

I have worked with Laura in the last few years in a small band, “Deep Tide Quartet”, along with Martin Archer and Kim Macari, and also in the larger groups Juxtavoices and “Engine Room Favourites”. I am responding with paintings, drawings and constructions to poems and prose written by Laura.

In turn, Laura is responding to my work with poems. I use the word “response” deliberately, as my work will not be illustrations of the poems, but more internalised emotional dialogues with the texts. This is an inspirational source for me and it has now become possible that another layer of the collaboration is occurring, a musical layer. This circularity of layering acts almost as a continuous, durational performance, almost a kind of synaesthesia.

On Saturday October 8th 2022, the ‘Pursuance’ project was featured on the main stage of Marsden Jazz Festival in St. Bartholemew’s Church. It was commissioned by the festival. The artist Andrew Martyn Sugars has made an hour long video of Laura’s poems and my paintings. This was projected in the church and acted as a score which a “Pursuance” project ensemble responded to. It consisted of myself on percussion, voice and electronics, Laura Cole on voice and piano, Faye MacCalman on saxophone, voice and and clarinet and on voice and trumpet Charlotte Keefe. It is the first of what will be an unfolding multi-disciplinary project, which will also have in it the sax and electronics artist Lara Jones.

In these difficult times it’s more important than ever that artists continue to share, collaborate, and together innovate possibly new forms of digital creative process.

The collaboration will be documented as it unfolds.

We call the collaboration “Pursuance”, after one of the poems.