Reformer Revolutions
2001
The Scottish Project
I spent some months in Scotland in 1997, during the months leading up to the vote that led to a devolved Scottish Parliament. A footnote in an essay on Scottish history opened up a new research topic, the life and times of Thomas Muir, a political reformer of the late 18th century who became radicalized by both his encounter with the French Revolution, and the severity of response of the British authorities to his rather mild pleas for change. I spent hours in the Scottish National Library archives, the Edinburgh Room at the Central Library in Edinburgh, and later at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. I also spent a month at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale researching their extraordinary collection of political caricatures from that period. The results were several small chapbooks, a couple of exhibitions, and a secondary series of paintings that ultimately took me in a different direction.
Escape Towards Liberty
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Escape Towards Liberty
The following year Nothing Moments Press in Los Angeles approached me about making a book, and I offered a third in the series. This one based on the diaries of a French trader who helped Muir escape Australia and cross the Pacific to California. To this I then added excerpts for several letters that Muir wrote to friends and family from Monterey while in captivity of the Spanish authorities. The book was illustrated by a series of drawings by Andrea Bowers, and designed by Penny Pehl and James W. Moore.
Gathered Under the Tree of Liberty
This 2013 book contains 39 black and white line portraits of Muir and some of his fellow reformers and revolutionists. These drawings were based on the painted portraits included in the Suburban show in 2004. It was funded by a grant from USA Projects (United States Artists) and designed by John Wiese.
Gathered Under the Tree of Liberty
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Paranoia on the High Seas
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Paranoia on the High Seas
The second book in the series was a joint production of Distrito Cu4rto, Madrid, and White Wine Press, Santa Monica, published in 2006. The text here is based on a long letter written by a fellow political prisoner who shared Muir’s transport to the penal colony in Botany Bay.
Pest of Scotland
In 1999 Visual Art Projects in Glasgow awarded me an Artist Research Fellowship to work with the Spanish architect, Enric Miralles, as he designed a new Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh. I had several preliminary meetings with him, at his office in Barcelona and in Edinburgh, before he died suddenly, in 2000. Too upset to continue with this, I asked if I could redirect the funds to publish a small chapbook based on my Thomas Muir research. This was the result, a text based on a transcript of Muir’s trial for sedition, edited and embellished. The book was designed by Jessica Fleischman, who would later design the look of EastofBorneo.
Pest of Scotland
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Sleeper Installation
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Constructing a World View; reconstructing a journey
Sleeper is a small gallery in the basement of an architectural firm in Edinburgh. I was invited to make a show there in late summer of 2001, and chose to paint a map of the world directly on the wall, faced by a listing of Muir’s travels, by longitude and latitude. The map was based on an older projection. The show opened on the first weekend of that September.