Everyone has designs: house plans, dress patterns, architectural models, future-proof technology, good old OS maps, intentions good, bad and preposterous… now Litro has designs on you. Can we tempt you to dip into some elegant short fiction?

This issue of Litro offers visual as well as literary riches. Andrzej Bursa is a new discovery for Litro: a Polish, literary James Dean whose dark, irreverent tale ‘Killing Auntie’ makes short work of the religious establishment. Gerard McCaul’s ‘Symmetry’ asks some sharp questions about science and the genesis of genius, while in his ‘A Dictionary Story’, Sam Winston writes from the point of view of that well-used but under-appreciated standby, your trusty dictionary. His piece has more than the ordinary twist in its tail, as you will see.

We are not short of poetry either. David Hermann opens the issue with a couple of throwaway lyrics astutely pinpointing aspects of London. Sophie Mayer’s poem ‘London Fashion Week / Pelvis’ should leaven the unrelenting glitz of LFW before we expire from an overdose. And we close with an extract from a writer who knew all about fashion: Marcel Proust. Why go to the theatre when you can plan it all out in your head, right down to the ladies’ jewellery? He might have a point.

Sophie Lewis &
Dena Ziari

London stands united
What a blast
We share the rain
Not the umbrella

David Hermann has written for film, television, print and online publications, is in the middle of a Masters degree in Comparative Literature and working on a collection of poems. He also plays in a band called Sherry Black and the Port Authority.

1

I left home in the afternoon, at four. After a few steps I stopped. I needed a purpose. Nothing came to mind. I resumed my walk like a condemned man, resigned to aimless wandering around the town. I went out for these long and exhausting walks almost every day. But always made sure I had a purpose. Chores, visits. Never did any of that of course. After all, I had nothing to do, no one to visit. But the purpose was there, even though I knew it was a sham.

Today for the first time I realised I had no purpose. I went out without a reason. Those purposeless, lonely walks were murderous. I knew that. In summer, when I walked through woods, fields or overgrown riverbanks, they had at least some justification. They didn’t tire me so much. Absorbed into the landscape, becoming part of it, I didn’t have to think. I could rest. But in winter the town brought no calm. I ambled around, stopping in front of old gateways and shop windows full of displays wrapped in cellophane but found no solace in either. I appreciated – and understood – the charms of architecture and of the city lights yet saw no point in contemplating them. I longed for a purpose like a sick man longing for a cure. Held hostage by my own nature, I suffered terribly.

I walked slowly and with difficulty. The downy snow, which had fallen during the day, lay on the pavements like heaps of manna. I waded through them. The interminable circling of the streets was wearing me out. I knew that overcome by exhaustion I would soon reach a point when I would think of returning home with pleasure and, barely standing, rejoice at the sight of my window. But it was no consolation. I knew too that back at home, resting on my bed, I would reach for the mirror and look at myself. For a long time.

I examined my face several times a day, every day, looking for signs of maturity or old age. But the face remained stubbornly young. Nine years of youth lay before me like an endless fallow field unfit for farming. On top of that all my limbs were in perfect order and I was in rude health. There was no salvation. Aimless wandering in bad weather was no fun. Return home was impossible. The thought that I could spend the rest of the afternoon and the evening poring over recommended reading set at the university barred my way. There was only the street, which ruled out any surprises.

In my wandering I could never keep away from the centre. All the excuses could be found within the surrounding boulevards. Today I hadn’t dared to break my habit. Yet the main streets and squares tired me with their noise and crowds. I turned surreptitiously into a narrow, almost empty street close to the main thoroughfare. I found myself in the middle of a labyrinth of old streets bordering on the centre yet completely isolated from it. By the gates hung bells on wires. On the backs of crabs, unicorns and little bears carved over the pediments lay snow. The labyrinth wasn’t big. I could cross it both ways in ten minutes. So I walked as slowly as I could, trying to keep my strides short, resisting the temptation to stop. I reached the stone wall of the Capuchin monastery. I knew that in a few seconds I’d come to a small square by the river. From there I could see the tarmac alley which I’d have to take as my return route. The prospect made me want to stop several times and run the other way. But the route led through the streets I knew by heart; there was no point in running away from the tarmac alley straight back into the embrace of a noisy road.

When I got to the end of the wall I stopped for a moment’s rest, like a swimmer about to plunge back into the water. I looked to one side. Two stone angels wearing snowy hats stood guarding the small gate in front of a church. The courtyard before the little church was an oasis of peace. Over the surrounding wall, below street level, tree branches stuck out from the orchard on the other side. They were covered in snow. I was long hardened to all kinds of soppiness and so was able to look calmly at the relief on the walls and trees growing in the cloister, which I had known so well since childhood.

From the door leading into the enclosure a bearded monk came out with a broad wooden shovel and began to clear the snow. He didn’t pay any attention to me but I felt awkward. I stepped out of his way and began to study the relief on the wall. The monk kept shovelling the snow, panting laboriously. The longer we were alone the more awkward I felt. In the end I reached the point of no return. Slowly, I approached the gate and entered the church. I took a quiet pew at the back. I was not alone. Three elderly women knelt in front of me, two in the pew, one on the stone floor. Above the altar flickered a little flame like a small red heart. Next to the side altar shone a luminous entrance to a small cavern. Inside it, behind a strong grille, lay the golden arm of a seventeenth-century hero.

Once I knew well a legend about the hero who bequeathed his golden arm, a gift from the king, to the Capuchin order. Today some details were missing from memory. Hiding in the pew I took for myself the role of an observer. A banal and thankless role: there was nothing to observe here. From the sacristy a surpliced monk came out with a stole over his neck. Briskly he crossed the floor and shut himself in the confessional. I didn’t see his face well but with his beard and a high brow he seemed to me beautiful. He was tall, broad-shouldered, not young. The trellis on the confessional door closed, the stole was hung outside. I thought that at this time it was unlikely anyone would come to confession. By the altar I spotted the same monk who had been sweeping the snow. He was performing some strange ritual which involved a lot of kneeling. It was high time for me to leave; I just didn’t feel like it. In the empty church (the three women being gone), facing the mute expectation of the priest-confessor, I felt I had found my role. I got up and walked up to the confessional, knelt and knocked. For a fleeting moment I felt fear and stage fright, but I didn’t back down. Something rustled inside the confessional and the priest welcomed me with a Latin formula. I took a deep breath and recited back:

‘I last came to confession more or less six – no – seven years ago.’
‘Why so long, son?’
‘I lost faith.’
‘What else, my son?’

The priest’s voice was weary and passionless. My blasphemous confession didn’t make much impression on him. I was crestfallen. I hesitated. I didn’t know what to say. Desperately I was trying to remember the formulae from school confessions.

‘Since then . . . since then I offended the Lord with many sins . . .’
‘Confess them, my son.’
‘I was . . .’ I hesitated again. ‘I was disobedient with my superiors . . . I lied, and then bore false witness against my brother . . .’
I was getting hopelessly confused.
‘What else, my son?’
I frowned and after some thought whispered triumphantly:
‘I sinned against the sixth commandment.’
The priest stirred in his seat.
‘Many times?’
‘Oh no, not that many,’ I sighed regretfully.
‘What else, my son?’

I couldn’t sense in my confessor’s voice any concern. Feverishly I was looking for words with which I could reveal to him the full horror of my inner life, which should terrify a holy man. In vain. The priest was already whispering the final formula. In a moment I would hear him knock on the confessional and walk away defeated. I quickly pressed my lips to the wooden lattice and whispered earnestly:

‘Father, holy Father,’ I corrected myself, ‘I concealed one sin.’
The priest leaned to the lattice. I lowered my voice.
‘I concealed a terrible sin . . .’ I went for a dramatic pause and then whispered emphatically:
‘I killed a human being.’
Ah, no more indifferent ‘what else, my son?’ now. The priest was panting. After a moment’s silence he asked in an unnaturally loud voice:
‘Whom?’
‘My aunt.’
‘Oh, my son . . . It’s a terrible sin, terrible.’
The priest was lost for words. Now I was cold and to the point.
‘How did it happen?’
In the priest’s voice, apart from a hellish, almost unchristian curiosity, I detected a note of enthusiasm.
‘Holy Father,’ I whispered gravely, ‘’tis unfitting to speak about.’
‘In confession one has to tell everything, everything,’ he insisted pleadingly.
I decided to be succinct.
‘OK then. I killed her with a hammer.’
‘Hammer . . . Oh my son, it’s a terrible sin, a grave sin . . .’
‘Holy Father, more important than the gate of Hades is my soul,’ I replied courteously.
The priest fell silent for a while and then asked:
‘Had your aunt wronged you in any way?’
‘No.’
‘So why did you kill her?’
I hung my head.
‘Were you led to it by the repulsive jingle of gold?’
The priest was trying to rise to his role. I felt grateful.
‘No, Father, to the contrary.’
‘Why to the contrary?’
‘Killing my aunt I deprived myself of my main means of support. She gave me board and lodging.’
‘So why did you do it?’
‘I’m a murderer, Father.’
The priest fell silent again. And after a while:
‘How old are you, my son?’
‘Twenty-one.’
‘Oh, twenty-one . . . Was it . . . was it your first time?’
‘First what, Father?’
‘Had you killed before?’
‘No, Father. I would have confessed, wouldn’t I?’
‘True. Oh my son, repent your deed and cry over your soul.’
‘I can’t repent, Father.’
‘Why, my son?’
‘I’m a hardened sinner.’
‘Oh my son,’ the priest was hopelessly confused. ‘Oh my son, cry over your soul . . .’
But then the curiosity won the upper hand.
‘But you had to have a motive. Why did you kill?’
‘I don’t know, Father.’
He hesitated.
‘You are not . . . sick, are you?’
‘No, Father.’
‘So why, my son? Why?’
‘I sought peace in crime.’
‘You can find peace only in prayer.’
‘I’m too young to waste my days on prayers.’
‘But, son,’ the priest got irritated. ‘There are so many other sins . . .’ He stopped abruptly. After a while he started again: ‘Are you feeling weak and abandoned?’
‘Oh I do, Father.’
‘Then repent your sin and cry with me. Difficult years of prison, provided you spend them in remorse and penitence, will atone for your crime.’
‘I’ve no intention of going to prison.’
‘How have you managed to hide your crime?’
‘I haven’t. I’ve done it only this morning.’
‘What have you done with the corpse?’
‘For now it’s in my kitchen. I’ll try to get rid of it.’
‘How . . .’ He bit his tongue, apparently realising the question was not quite in keeping with his work as a confessor.
‘I’ve got a plan.’
‘I don’t want to know. Do you repent of your sin, my son?’
‘I can’t, Father.’
‘Repent, my son.’ He was pleading with me tearfully. ‘Or you’ll go to hell.’
‘Is it horrible, Father?’
‘Oh, son!’ cried out the priest, grateful for my question.

And he began to paint the picture. The way he was doing it told me he was a just a catechist. But his picture of hell surpassed all the best lessons I could remember from childhood. My confessor was inspired. Throughout his life he had been unleashing the horrors of hell to scare small-time sinners for their pranks played on teachers, their masturbation or laziness, only to have his efforts rewarded with today’s confession. The grand vision of inferno painted for the benefit of such an extraordinary criminal was the sweet fruit that fell into his lap in an empty church, out of the blue, on an afternoon one could expect nothing from. Necessity breeds inventors, necessity breeds heroes. Today I learned that necessity – or rather need – breeds artists. I had seen many reproductions of Old Masters depicting hell but none had come close to my confessor’s tirade. That was real hell. Seething, blazing, putrid. I easily forgave my confessor some catechetic naivety for the sweeping power of his vision.

The church was empty again. The monk had put out all the lights except for the little red lamp. There were only the two of us, the hero’s golden arm, and hell. At last the priest ran out of breath.

‘My son,’ he pleaded, ‘repent your crime.’
‘I can’t, father.’
‘Then I can’t give you absolution.’
It all began to turn nasty.
‘Then I’ll walk away with hell in my heart.’

I got up to my feet, as if ready to leave. The priest rustled hurriedly inside the confessional.
‘No, son, don’t go away.’ He lowered his voice and I heard in his words a playful note.
‘If you can find in you perfect remorse, the most pleasing to the Lord, an imperfect one will be enough . . . Think of all the horrors of hell and fear the deed which condemns you to such torture. That will be enough.’

The priest’s voice was so sympathetic I was ready to express my imperfect remorse. Still, I held back. Showing an imperfect remorse would give my confessor a paltry satisfaction. This extraordinary confession would have a very cheap and trivial epilogue in a common criminal’s fear of chains and fire. So I said:

‘Father, an imperfect remorse will not atone for such a crime before the Lord.’
The priest was delighted.
‘My son,’ he said, ‘words like these suffice for a remorse.’
‘It’s not worth much, though.’
‘Son, I’m crying for your soul,’ whispered the priest, ‘I truly am.’

He felt his inspiration was waning but still could not let go of me. The confession got stuck in a dead end. I pitied the priest. Anxiously, I started looking for a way out of the impasse. In the end I suggested:

‘My crime is still fresh today. I’m still breathing blood. But tomorrow, or in a few days’ time, if God lets me live that long, perhaps the grace of remorse will come to me.’
‘Come tomorrow then, my son,’ hurriedly advised the priest. ‘In the afternoon, or in the evening. Between four and six. I’ll be waiting every day.’

The priest sounded excited and joyous. He appreciated the chance I gave him. Today’s confession will be more than just a beautiful moment in his life. It will open a difficult, glorious path to the salvation of a murderer, a path full of terrible mysteries. I have elevated my cleric to the level of a missionary converting cannibals, of a Saint Hieronymus taming a lion. He was pleased like child, and it pleased me too. When I rose from my knees, the priest reminded me once more:

‘So, between four and six, four and six p.m.’
His voice trembled with the anxiety of a parting lover.

Chapter I of ‘Killing Auntie’ by Andrzej Bursa, extracted from Killing Auntie and Other Work, will be published by CB editions in October 2009.

CB editions (www.cbeditions.com) publishes short fiction, poetry and translations. Its first fiction title won the 2008 McKitterick Award; its first book of new poetry is shortlisted for the 2009 Forward Prize for best first collection.

juts its bones in
couture: organza
sky distressed

over the West End’s
knowing armour – it’s
all about structure,

darling, the single
crane dangling its
ruby earring: blood

pendent amidst blue,
last drop on the map
wrapped and worn

as a dress; the full
moon is artless, a silver
given, a fluorescent

puffball scattering
glitter spores of desire
over the shards, ascendant

crystals healing only
sceptics: the hard city
softened by chiffons of

fog as it tries to rise,
a ten-inch heel spiking
the stars into the sky.

© Sophie Mayer, from Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman, 2009).
Sophie Mayer is the author of Her Various Scalpels and The Cinema of Sally Potter: A politics of love (Wallflower, 2009). She is a Commissioning Editor at Chroma and moderator of the English PEN Online Atlas. Her writing about film and her poetry have appeared in magazines ranging from Sight & Sound and Vertigo to Staple, Seam and Stand.

*
What Makes a Person Great?

His name is Alexander Maynard, and the question is one that has robbed him of more sleep than any other. He knows his life is exceptional, but is ignorant of the reason why. On dark and lonely nights, he consoles his ego with the idea that success was inevitable, that he has always possessed a mighty intellect that cannot be stopped.
He knows this is a lie. Alexander’s life is the consequence of circumstance and chance, the sum of all his experiences. Some of it he chose, most was decided before he was even born.
Alexander was the only son of Joseph Maynard, a man crippled by his work and ambition. Before the birth of his only child, Joseph had been trained as a mechanical engineer, finding work designing the fiddly bits in European cars. It had been well paid, and Joseph was the kind of man who could become truly enthusiastic about the minutiae of design. He was a man more proud of the details in his work than of its function. Days could be spent experimenting with the best shape for a wing mirror to reduce drag, or the precise folding mechanism for a windscreen wiper. If it wasn’t work, Joseph would be content scrutinising any object he could lay his hands on, to the extent that his garage was often nothing more than a carpet of screws and sheets of metal – hundreds of items in various states of disassembly that Joseph would begin and soon forget about.
Ultimately, it would be Joseph’s relentless desire to tinker that put Alexander on the path to greatness. Shortly before Alexander was born, his father was given the job of examining and tuning a prototype car before it was tested. Going above and beyond the call of duty, Joseph often worked late, always eager to find some fault to correct, and though he was enthusiastic he was not the most cautious man in the world. The car manufacturer would call the incident a “tragic accident” and Joseph was compensated generously, but nothing could change the facts. A malfunctioning car jack had left Joseph with two tonnes of German steel lying on his midsection, paralysing him completely.
Alexander was born just days after his father’s accident, with the mother leaving them shortly after that. Whoever she had been, Alexander’s mother did not want to deal with two invalids at once. Joseph was left staring at a hospital ceiling for almost a month before he first saw his only son. It had been an auspicious day – 29th February 2012.
Alexander had often wondered what his life would be like if his father had been killed beneath that car, instead of paralysed. It probably wouldn’t have made life any easier, but it might have made it a little more normal. After the accident, the young Alexander was all Joseph had left in the world. The shock of his wife’s departure nearly broke the man completely, and the nurse did not help by constantly putting some warm lump of infant near his face. His newborn son never smelt of anything but stale vomit. It wasn’t a good start to their relationship, and with little else to think about, Joseph began to wonder how he could make his future life bearable. The trouble was that his son was like any other baby, and unless he did something, would likely end up being just like any other child.
Joseph had always assumed the mother would take care of the boy until he was old enough to learn differential equations, but that wasn’t going to happen anymore. So for the first year of Alexander’s life, Joseph watched the child from his bed, as he was changed and fed by the nurse. For almost a year, Joseph did not leave the hospital bed as operation after operation attempted to replace his shattered vertebrae. By the time father and son were ready to return home, the seeds of a plan had been sown in the engineer’s mind. His son was a complex, albeit useless machine. It was different, because it could not be worked on with a hammer or a twelve thousand-pound laser-cutter, but he felt confident that his son could be improved nevertheless. When Joseph was lowered into his wheelchair for the first time, and his son placed on his lap, he smiled for the first time since the accident. He had found something new to tinker with.
‘Tell us about your father – you’ve always said he was your single biggest influence.’
‘Mmh. I think you could blame him for my success. He was a very… complex man.’
‘Complex? How so?’
‘Actually, complex is the wrong word. Insane might be more accurate. He was a man obsessed by the truth, and obsessed with making me capable of finding it.’
‘And that’s why you became a physicist?’
‘In a way, my father turned me into a scientist long before I got a salary for it. He thought every question deserved nothing less than a rigorous answer. It never occurred to him that when a four year-old asks why the sky is blue, he doesn’t want a lecture on electromagnetic radiation and quantised energy levels in the atom. … I suppose it’s why I never asked him what made grass green.’
It wasn’t until Alexander was eleven that he realised what a strange life he had led. All he had known were the teachings of his father, and he had embraced them. There had been no storytime for him, only foundations of mathematics. Instead of building blocks, Alex had been given a two-stroke engine and four years to build his own. What was stranger than Joseph’s complete ignorance towards child rearing was how well Alex coped with it. It was almost frightening how accomplished the quiet and attentive Alexander had become in the last ten years. It made the father wonder whether his son was exceptional, or if all children were capable of the extraordinary perception Alex possessed. It hardly mattered though – Joseph had discovered a great joy in shaping and changing something with nothing but words. The satisfaction of imparting some lesson on the nature of the universe and watching as his son’s behaviour change before his eyes. It was a beautiful thing to nourish Alex with nothing but facts, and to watch as the boy cultivated the same principles – the same prejudices – that his father held so dear. Crippled but happy, it was not long before Joseph took real pride in his son.
Joseph had never bothered to send his son to a primary school, believing that his young prodigy would only be “contaminated and dulled” by the experience. In fact, Alex’s contact with the outside world had been minimal until Joseph announced that he would send his son to secondary school. It wasn’t so that Alex could learn anything – Joseph was sure he had already taught the boy anything worth knowing – but so that he could experience what he described as “the harsh reality of modern society”.
‘He had a real chip on his shoulder. He hated, hated what society had done to science. He only sent me to school so I could “see how stupid people are”. It shocked me, but I never hated it like he did. He loathed alternative medicines, had nothing but disdain for the media and despised the cult of celebrity. …It’s funny, but it seems the latter half of my life has become a study in irony because of it.’
‘Some would say you’ve inherited these strong views. Do you think science still suffers from misrepresentation?’
‘First of all, my opinions are not that of my father. He was never happier than when some global disaster threatened civilisation. He always thought they happened because politicians had failed to listen to the experts. I can’t imagine how happy he’d have been if he lived to see the thirties. That actually leads me back to your question – after that decade of everything going wrong, no one was quite so apathetic anymore. So yeah, I think people are definitely better informed now, because they know growth and stability depends upon scientific advancement. I think it can only be a good thing that the world at large was made aware of the cost that maintaining our lifestyle incurs. Having said that, most of my work has absolutely zero benefit to the public – at least until some bright spark finds a practical use for it.’
‘And is that likely to happen? How does theoretical physics help the public?’
‘In lots of ways. For example, the technologies that have relieved our uranium dependence started life in the Shanghai LPPA. In a very real sense, particle physics stopped the war in Niger.’
‘That’s a bold claim to make: “theoretical physics ends wars”.’
‘…You should use that as your headline.’
There were always complications. His father’s funeral was the first time that Alex felt there might exist things that could not be reduced into formulae and distilled into logic. He had never felt so conflicted as when the coffin disappeared from sight beneath the earth. It suddenly occurred to him that he’d never see his father again, never hear the whirr of his wheelchair motor. That low hum that had always warned of Joseph’s advance… It had been comforting to Alex as a child, but by his teens he’d come to hate that sound, recognising it as a herald of bitter arguments. As a thirteen year-old Alex had thought stairs were the greatest invention on the planet.
And all that was behind him now. His father had been his biggest – his only – link to his past, and now he was dead. Alex found himself wishing he’d argued less with his father in the last few years, and wondered why it should even matter. His father didn’t care; he was dead, that was the point. That was definitely one of Joseph’s lessons – dead people don’t care what you say because they are dead. He seemed to go out of his way to offend the religiously minded whenever the opportunity arose. Alex smiled at the thought, considering what an ignominious end his father had come to. He shouldn’t have died, but for the spine. He’d been complaining about the pain for years, and six months ago he’d finally come to the top of the waiting list for another operation on his back.
There had been complications, some kind of infection because the operating theatre hadn’t been sterilised properly. Ordinarily it would have been treatable, but it was able to rapidly progress up and down Joseph’s useless spine. Useless for everything but killing him it seemed. Because the infection had started in the spine, by the time doctors noticed it had already knocked out most of his central nervous system. A stupid, slow death for a man who had spent over eighteen years trapped in his own body. When Joseph could no longer swallow, he was fed intravenously. When he couldn’t breathe, he was put on life support. It had taken almost half a year for the end to come and Alex had ignored the whole ordeal. The doctors had tried calling, but they’d been ignored right up until the letter containing his father’s death certificate arrived.
A stupid death. The thought reverberated around the young man’s head as each shovel of dirt clattered against the coffin. It wouldn’t have happened if the theatre had been properly sterilised. That would have been done if the work experience boy didn’t have a habit of picking his nose, but even so none of it would have mattered if his father hadn’t needed the operation. If a single car jack had done its job almost two decades ago, none of this would have happened.
For the first time Alex wondered what his life would have been like if his father had chosen to leave work on time and on his feet eighteen years ago.

‘That was the first time I ever really felt how perilous my existence – everyone’s existence – really is. I’m still a little ashamed it took so long for me to realise.’
‘Was it difficult to cope without your father?’
‘I wish I could say it was, but by the time he died I was two terms into my first year of university, and before that we hadn’t had a proper conversation in years. He always thought I was “wasting my ability”.’
‘So how did you feel when you heard the news that he was dead?’
‘Annoyed, more than anything else. We’d lived at the opposite end of the country to where I was studying and I knew I was going to have a nightmare getting down in time for the funeral, an expensive nightmare. I still remember that it was the week after BP declared bankruptcy and the whole transport system was in chaos. I had to wait two days for a train in Manchester. All I could think was how many lectures I was missing and how much this trip was costing me. Until I actually got to the graveyard, I was convinced I wasting my time.’
‘Why? What happened when you arrived?’
‘I had that revelation all kids fail to have until their parents are dead – too late to change anything, of course. You never have that sort of problem in physics. The time you discover something should be irrelevant, because the universe should be time symmetric – that it doesn’t matter when you do something, the outcome should be the same. An apple that falls in winter should fall in the same way the next summer. It doesn’t work like that for people though, and as it turns out, it doesn’t work like that in physics either.’

Gerard McCaul is eighteen and hopes to go to university in September… to study physics, natch. He likes to read, play Age of Empires and spin fire poi.

Sam Winston creates sculpture, drawings and books that play with our understanding of words, both as a carriers of messages and as information itself. He started writing stories and selling artist books through London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and can now be found in collections including MoMA New York; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; the Tate Galleries London, and Victoria & Albert Museum.

His work is currently on show in the Courtauld Institute in London.