Organic Devolution

This… THING! We’re on a plane to Australia this coming Monday and Matt sends through this pic of a new custom-made surf mat he’s built to replace my Mc-25 that was lost at sea not too far back… Frothing. It’s going to be weird enough heading back to the Sunshine Coast again. I never saw anyone surfing mats there apart from the wee ones in the shallows, certainly nothing like what I’ve been…

Farewell bottle jack press

It’s a hard decision to make but I just don’t reckon this thing will qualify as carry-on luggage. My 6-tonne bottle jack press now needs a good home so I’m looking for a printmaker to give it a good home. Today is our final Sunday at the Strandhill People’s Market in Strandhill, Sligo, and I’ll be bringing the press out to have in our stall and from there be assessing the submissions of potential…

Run, run as fast as you can

Last few days left before we move out of our house in Sligo and begin the long journey back to Australia, eventually Hobart in Tasmania. Exciting and hectic times. There’s a lot on, a lot of loose ends to tie up, decisions on what to pack or cull… (more…)

This print continues to prove to be a tricky one to get out right – and it’s the getting it out right which is what the printmaker’s ongoing challenge is. Each fin is a direct reference to fins I’ve owned, trialled, coveted, with one in the collection that is the golden hatchet to rule them all, the one that has been pivotal (ahem) to my Rooster-shaped, 9’6 BeachBeat Pacer. The image of the fins…

I like those spots you turn up so where you can’t see the breaking wave from where you kill the engine. Park up on the cliff, at the end of the lane, under the mountain, at the gate… sometimes you can hear it as soon as you get out of the car and sometimes, before you get out of the car. To check it or just commit and suit up. The latter is often more fun, throw the gamble in there. Though the…

Well folks, it’s finally happened – the Organic Devolution Online Shop is now live! A hard graft over the past few months, hyper compressed in the last two weeks to get things revamped here in the OD blog and integrated with the new Shop. Huge thanks to my sibling web-guru, Heidipj, for her stellar work on getting it all together and giving this salty bearded doodler the motivation needed to…

It was a busy few days knocking these out. The one on the bottom right was carved and printed in Tasmania, Australia, about three years ago and only now have I gotten around to carving others in a similar style. The inspiration comes from a very special and rarely surfed spot on Tasmania’s north coast. Stumbling across it on an absent-minded beachcombing around the coast on a flat day I saw the…

We’re knee-deep in it now. The short days, grey skies and horizontal sleet out here. So soon are folks forgetting how great the weather has been the last two months. I’m glad I began stockpiling driftwood as soon as we moved out west. Most recently I’ve been exploring the possibilities of some sort of studio-space that we could expand into. We’ve recently picked up a shiny new (2nd hand in pretty…

Now only a week away Sligo Design Week (kudos to Denise Rushe, the darling from Starling, et al. for the hard yards put in behind it) has come to fruit with an exciting mix of exhibitions, talks, happenings and workshops. I was approached a little while back to see if I’d be keen to host a linocut printing workshop. Was I keen? I was frothing! I’ve got an hour to introduce relief print-making and…

I’m surprised I’ve neglected the blog for so long. The blog but also the site in general. To all those folks I’ve spoken to over the past two (crikey, and a half? Three?) months, enthusiastically directing them there to keep an eye on the new work that has been coming along, studio action… I offer some apologies and a brief round-up. A little more over three months back we moved from the burbs of…

And this little piggy…

It seems almost overwhelming trying to get things organised for the next month. We’re relocating out west to Sligo for another year. There, bombshell (for some) dropped. The shift is happening next weekend – from rolling tarmac to rolling fields. A cottage out on the raggedy peninsula in north County Sligo where, from the backyard, the magnificence of Dartry mountains loom up in the east and to…

The last few weeks I’d been looking for resources to build my own printing press. It was an offhand comment that a friend had made at dinner one night that one could make one using a car jack. Wha..? Well how hard could that be, I thought. When a close friend out west said he’d open up his workshop and offer his craft expertise to make the press a reality I jumped at it. Building the press out…

Been a busy few days knocking these out. The one on the bottom right was carved and printed in Tasmania, Australia, about three years ago and only now have I gotten around to carving others in a similar style. The inspiration comes from a very special and rarely surfed spot on Tasmania’s north coast. Stumbling across it on an absent-minded beachcombing around the coast on a flat day I saw the…

Crystals in the Krypt?

There was something rattling around inside my Krypt surfmat. I could feel something gritty in there. I thought it might have been bits of sand, perhaps also some shell grit. Gently rubbing the corner of the mat I could feel hard, gritty lumps. Were these little bits going to poke pin-holes or cuts from the inside? How the heck could this have gotten inside my surf mat? Perhaps the winter…

Blue skies and sunshine and the pressure to get something done before heading out west again for the weekend – deadlines make things happen. Unearthing an old t-shirt stencil I discovered that with a little tweak the past pisstake on an boogieboard-riding old fella becomes mirror for my recent dignity-stripping transition from stand-ups to surf mats.

The design was originally inspired from the…

Ahh, paid employment. It seems such a quaint thing of days gone by.

Part of my last job was culturing algae (specifically the marine diatom, Phaeodactylum tricornutum) for use in ecotoxicology; we were testing the toxicity of products developed to assist in the clean up of oil spills. Large walk-in refrigerated rooms with walls of fluorescent lights and shelves on which sat beautiful big boiling…

Four days in the Kingdom - a hunting we will go...

I was most happy to acquiesce to her suggestion. It sounded good, it made my insides thrum low. I put the fins in just in case. A five-hour haul down and across to that gnarled paw of Ireland’s southwest where the twisted, arthritic fingers of counties Cork and Kerry claw out from the coastline into the Atlantic.

We’re a little ball-bearing rattling and ricocheting through a mute post-winter…