Nearly half way done, is this piece. A very long graphic, a tableaux, entitled rather pretentiously -The Birth of the Modern - It's a map like confection, a visual reference/time chart - which chronicles the last half of the 18th.century, through the first half of the 19th.

It's intention (real or imagined) is to illustrate at a glance, how our Modern World beginning roughly in the 1880's, arose.

Unrepentantly subjective, it's a purely personal study of the confluence of notable people and singular events, that transpired over the late 17oo's and early 18'oos and which led, invariably and inextricably to our modern world.



Populated by villains, visionaries, princes and pimps, it's an evocation, rather than an analysis, and tries, more through insinuation, than instruction, to delineate the Modern world's circumference.



It's a bloody massive poster kind of thing, and at 100"x36" - it is in fact more like a mural. It's conceived to roll up like a map or chart, and unroll for display or study. It comes in a old fashioned paper tube, with suitable affectations, such as period labels, and other facsimile materials from the period, like letters, stamps, ID cards, photographs and other marginalia, and of course, a small magnifying glass.



While large, and obvious in its architecture, it's dense with secrets and absurdities and makes many questionable but poetic associations. Much of the texts are tiny, and some are intentionally un-readable without the aid of the glass... It does honour, rightfully so, the major characters and momentous events of the period, but, it is also intended to be, and as much, a minuet of innuendo.

Nearly pornographic in ambition, it makes no claims to efficacy, and is really intended to be an intellectual amusement, rather than an exercise in any recognizable field of erudition.



It begins with Captains Cook's famous voyage to the South Seas c.1775 - which was undertaken, to, amongst other things to chronicle the "Transit of Venus". This remarkable voyage has been described, as the first, "real", Modern Scientific Expedition, and was intended to provide, by Cooks great skills at navigation, and by the particular brilliance of it's scholarly explorers, the first accurate measurement of the Earth's size, by first deducing Venus's transit time across the sun during a southern eclipse, and from that - interpolating, empirically, for the first time, and in what must have been, a glorious moment of astronomical clarity, where we were in the Universe.



I chose this event as the starting point, because it seemed, at least to me, as the right place to begin.