PREFACE - DRILL ‘Obituary of a Hernia’ FIELD EDITION 2026
is book begins with a repair, a neglected tear sustained prior to my twenty + years as an artist. e rupture was one of many injuries collected during Command Field Gun Drills in the Royal Navy, in preparation for the now defunct Royal Tournament, and what I believed to be the last to be fixed - until fragments of boot began to emerge from my calf during the edits. So the text begins as an obituary for the hernia, but very quickly loses discipline and breaks up into fragments of histories, thoughts and observations that are returned to again and again, building a more complete story. Sometimes the pieces don’t conform to this rhythm and are le hanging, their relevance unsaid. is essay-like text is not separated from the sculpture practice that forms plates that break the text; it is part of the same system. e pages are not memoir or history in a formal sense. e structure is intentionally loose and follows the recursive, associative, oen unresolved and circular nature of memory itself. Drawing from paths in the arts and military, there is a search for focal points— navels where meaning gathers and around which human beings orient themselves: collisions of anatomy, geology, rituals, cosmology, humour and violence, military spectacle and primitive instincts. At the centre of this work is the Artists Rifles: the improbable regiment founded in an artist’s studio in Victorian London. e unit, inspired by Napoleonic affrays, blossomed through the horrors of the trenches to become an integral part of the Nation’s specialised war machine. is reflection was written in the shadow of contemporary conflicts, cultural instability and political fracture. It draws those at the fringes of society a little closer to the light, exploring emotions and exposing drives to imagine together, to destroy together, create, suffer, and sacrifice.