Mail Art

Mail Art piece for http://marielouiseplum.com/ 

An envelope that was sent to Oslo and returned at the time of the July 22nd events. There are 77 Nordic hearts altogether, to represent the victims, along with various snippets from Norwegian newspapers bought during my last trip to Oslo in 2010 - a story about love letters, and other found paraphernalia. I had this sitting in my studio waiting for an exhibition such as this. Postage is probably gonna cost a fortune though :-s

Jesus is coming, look busy!

Just wanted to share this Good Friday creation. It's been sitting on my desktop for a while. It's based on a dream I had not so long ago, a somewhat profound dream, or so I thought.
In this dream I was in a supermarket with Jesus. At first, I couldn't tell if it was really Jesus or just a 22 year old student that happened to look a lot like Jesus, but my mind resolved itself that he was actually Jesus. 

By the way, he was naked. In a supermarket. I guess that if Jesus really did come back to earth, he may well appear naked. Ref: The Second Coming with Christopher Eccleston.

So anyway, we were doing all this shopping and no one seemed to really notice naked Jesus much, even though in reality there would be a huge tutathon from Daily Mail readers at least! I guessed it was for some kind of party, for some kids at a church or something - the food / party, not the nudity!! 

I wondered how we were going to pay for all this shopping, and Jesus, being naked, didn't appear to have any cash on him or a wallet, but the answer came as swiftly as the question - he's Jesus, he doesn't have to pay for anything!

I wanted to illustrate this dream in A Scanner Darkly type way. Have been sneakily photographing supermarkets clandestinely, googled blokes that look like Jesus, that sort of thing, and spent some time rendering it just as it appeared in my dream. Here's the result.

Over Easter, I also saw Gunther Von Hagens' "Crucifixion". I've only ever seen Gunther's Bodyworlds work on the internet, and amused me in a James Bond film, but I've never had the opportunity to go and see it. And I found Gunther quite a scary bloke. But when I saw him talking about how he nearly died when he was 6, I could identify with that a bit, as I once communed with God after the birth of my first son. I was told by a face in some 1970s wallpaper that I wasn't going to die. It was all a bit Philip K Dick, but anyway, I digress.

The crucifixion never fails to make me cry. And it gave me a respect for Gunther Von Hagens to address this sympathetically, even though I suspected it was somewhat contrived, the result was a somewhat effeminate looking red vascular Christ. Having watched Constantine again, and having been to Hell not so long ago (!) the most recent crucifixion I'd seen was this one by Eric Drooker