This was something of a departure from my regular thing, but I dug it out recently and decided to include it here as a curiousity. It dates from the time I was just starting out making sculpture, and was also dabbling with other diciplines, including printmaking and digital imaging.

In the summer of 2000-2001, I worked briefly with the National Parks and Wildlife Service in Tasmania, building a walking track through the remote south-west. We got dropped of by helicopter and spent the next ten days camped out in the scrub, hauling granite blocks down from the ridge tops to make stepping stones. It was an interesting first ever paid job.

This project is an attempt to capture an old world feel with a high-tech medium. I was aiming for that explorer's-notebook feel, something like Indiana Jones' iconic diary or the journals of Mawson and Scott, while avoiding any specific content. To try and capture a feeling withing an object.

The illustrations are multi-layered compositions of photos I took at the time, heavily mixed and modified. The text is also multi-layered, and is composed of scans of my journal entries from the trip. The final piece was printed on watercolour paper (I think, it's been a while), and then bound in a hand-made leather cover I whipped up. I though about tea-staining the whole thing for that authentic weathered look, but chickened out since I'd already put so much work into it. Sometimes you need to know when to stop.

Click on the left/right pages to flip back and forth.