I just got an email through from Cut-Click to tell me the next leg of the Mail Art exhibition I took part in is happening next month in Dundee.

The Cut-Click mail art exhibition will be on display at the Creative Fair: Big Top Jamboree, this coming May 17th at Drouthy’s Basement, Perth Road, Dundee.

Please visit www.dundee-jamboree.blogspot.com for more details.

Well what appears to have happened is this: I have agreed to take on more projects than I should, leaving me to wonder where all my time is going. So what do I do? I spend all afternoon faffing about in charity shops buying Soviet Matryoshkas, daffodils and acquiring pleasant plastic bags. Which I then bother to photograph and stick on the internet. This solution has not helped one bit. So please do not do it when you have deadlines to meet.

More excitement! I received an email this morning telling me all about a lovely website called 'Dead Things We Find'.

"Dead Things We Find is a collection of images of found dead animals and a visual investigation of their death."

If there's two things I love in this world it's inkymess and deadbitz. I will be contributing photographs of the various dead things I've found forthwith.

Sally Dobbins (excellent name!), an Ink and Mess admirer who runs the site has sent me a photo to use on my other blog Favourite Graves. Check it, it's great!

Well, this is a bit of exciting news for me, and hopefully you, dear readers. I have been invited to take part in the Urban Arts Festival, hosted by the American Book Centre and ABC Treehouse, happening in Amsterdam, on 26th June.

I will be doing a bit of live art - scribbling, scrawling new faces on masks, pimping anything you care to bring me - and selling zines during the day on the square in front of the American Book Centre.

Later on in the day I will be leading a mask workshop in the ABC Treehouse. The workshop is a combination of theatre and live-art performance, investigating identity and imagination.

More information to come nearer the time - look out for it! I'll give you times, directions and a little bit of background to the lovely American Book Centre and ABC Treehouse.

I decided to make an up-cycled book for Gemma Correll's fabulous "What I Wore Today" blog. Gemma is a great illustrator and this is a neat idea, so here's my homage to her. As you can see my entries are a bit sporadic, but there's always deadlines to meet ad infinitum, so this is my hobby stuff...and I love it. Here's the What I Wore Today Flickr pool.

Now this one is going back some years. Anyway, Happy Bird Ate!

Through Lindsay Grime (my new favourite illustrator) I have connected to the very cool Scottish online resource for arts and artists. Central Station is an online networking hub with a difference - it's a far more rootsy place to find out what's happening, from events to projects, and also to promote your own artworks and goings-on. It's also Scottish based (funded by the Scottish Arts Council), and I'm sure by now you will have all worked out I am biased towards all things Scottish.

I have a profile page nestled in over there, and have just been updating it this evening, along with my Behance portfolio (which I hardly ever update...oops).

Now, go eat brains, children.

Here is one of my little brains-blown men with birds flying through his skull. It's an oil paint version of a recurring theme.

Hello Friends!

The ever hardworking, community-building Cut-Click (online magazine, exhibition curators, all round do-wells) have asked me to take part in their printed issue.

Out in 2 months time, the magazine will feature a never-seen-before, top-secret comic strip by me, as well as lots more work by many very talented people.

Cut-Click have blogged about the printed issue, and here's what they have to say:

"We are very pleased to announce that we are creating a printed issue of cut-click. The magazine will be an A6 limited edition of 100 copies and will go on sale in 2 months time.

The magazine will feature artwork from these fantastic creative people:

Mircea Constantinescu, Sarah Ferrari, David Shillinglaw, Marie Louise Plum, Tigzy Rice, Robin Boyden, Carl Harris, Jonathan Chapman aka Mr Yen, Sp:ke Dennis, Jo Cheung, Gareth Hopkins, Adam Whitham, Andy Council, Aditya Wijanarko, Danny Coyne, Pino Lamanna, Simon Wild, Simon Philipson, Lesley Barnes & Warren Craghead.

We have four A7 adverts available in the zine, so if your an artist or designer and have things to sell buy an advert with us for £30 and be in the first printed issue of cut-click."

So, if you have £30 to spare do invest in an ad with Cut-Click - you are guaranteed to be seen by a far and wide community so it's a great opportunity to get you/your product/your ideas seen.

We cut-click, do you? - http://www.cut-click.co.uk - http://www.twitter.com/cutclick

Here's an old pic from the archive for you - a submission for Amelia's Magazine, Issue 9

A mock-up of one of my favourite childhood books, Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls, poems selected by William Cole and published by Methuen.

I received such a beezer thing this week that I think I should write a thank-you post about it.

LuShae Jewelry are fans of my blog and sent me a cool ring to say just that, and wanted to know what I thought of them. Well, I went to check out their site today and found tons of cool stuff on it. As well as quite straight-laced stuff like pretty-girl earrings and necklaces, they have my kind of rings and things too...check out this skull and bones one, this roped gem thing and a fabulous crown ring.

Okay, so here's a pic of the ring they sent me. Love it! Skull and crossbones, however did they guess that would be my kind of thing I wonder.



Go and check out their website, and buy something fun from them!

I took a trip to the Hunterian Museum, London, yesterday. I specify London as there is also a Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, and a Hunterian in Glasgow. If you're wondering what the Hunterian is all about, here's a jolly video from their website.

Okay, okay, my main reason for this post is to show you the following images, which, whether you're an artist, surgeon or solicitor you should find inspirational in one way or another.

The specimens are all real.

I bought this yesterday for one tiny pound from Ripping Yarns bookshop on the Archway Road. I've never printed any of my work on an old-fashioned press, on heavy textured paper, with black as black ink, semi-embossed, sewn together with a single strand of thick thread. I love it. It feels great and looks even better. The full poem is below the pictures.






So too with the sea:
the need to fuss

over rock and island,
gulls, bathers, shipping, sand

to speak
of the unspeakable.

And not so too:

the sea has been home,
life swims there still.

After such insult

where would the sea go,
would there still be flies?

The first sound allowed me
as the jets head away

is the click of scissors,
Delyth in the bathroom
trimming her nails.

The second
is the wind

piecing together
a shattered world.

There is hunger too
in the fatted world,

people starved of history,
starved of language
and a place to be.

If hunger is all
that some people think
they will ever have

they will not want to save it.

To be now at war
with megalies, amnesia:
the only poem.

Why then when I wake
is it thought of her
more than all this-

the long thinking
of brown deep eyes,
those long-boned fingers,
years, atlantic leagues from me now-

that launches first strike
on the physical heart?

They'll say, the fatted ones,
they just don't want to know.

Death is the embarrassment.

From a droplet of water
to winds abroad
in curious freedom

there'd be no more friends.

Disagreeable the deaths,
regrettable the damage...

The names lie,
the lies name:

our words commit our suicide.

Un-
thinkable?

Nagasaki,
the second thought,
continues to unthink us.

Suddenly this spring
a thousand questions I need to ask
of a blade of grass.

I note once daily, sometimes twice,
the shrill of the siren
at Kittle quarry: 30 seconds precisely,
then, following the bump
of the blast (heard only if
the wind is right),
three short wails, and all
is clear.

It's another of those familiar things
noticed now anew

and I wish that it were not.

What to do with this fear?
Hold it fast, pass it on.

We change now or die.

Well, here it is.

Good news! In the next few months I will be setting up a lovely Plum Emporium, an online shop where you can buy handmade books and journals to keep your secrets in, tailor-made stationary, greetings cards, postcards, fanzines and ephemera along with trinkets, novelty items and vintage bits and pieces, original artworks, wooden toys, puzzles and matryoshka dolls. I will also be selling a range of T-shirts via Finroo. In further future times I will be blogging handy tips, tricks and tutorials and on the Emporium - from mask making to puppeteering, saddle-stitched books to using dip pens and making Plum pies...it will all be there. Keep following the blog to find out more. If you're not yet following me on Twitter, be a pal, join me!

A great prize of no prize goes to the first person to correctly identify the wily fox below. My first attempt at drawing this person so be kind!

The Cut-Click exhibition has now closed. This is a plea for new venues! If you would like to put on the exhibition, or know a suitable venue, please contact Caroline Twidle at caroline.cutclick [at] gmail dot com.

Here's some artwork from the exhibition...

I've blogged about Dave MacDowell before - his paintings thrill me! Slow Decade have blogged about his multicoloured nightmare plains, and got their description of his work spot on. Read the article here.