before the naming
after the labelling

Supported by Brisbane's Access Arts SAFE Grant, this limited-edition artist book is a hybrid text that brings together new and old pieces spanning over thirty years across drawing, painting, photography, and writing. It is structured as a two-sided flip book with two separate titles, Before the Naming and After the Labelling.

The poetry in Before the Naming is spare and restrained, holding states of longing, concealment, and becoming in language that refuses spectacle, resolution, or fixed identity, allowing the self to remain tentative, searching, and unfinished. In After the Labelling, prose and image speak from within the lived reality of bipolar disorder, tracing a body shaped not only by illness itself, but by the social, psychiatric, and linguistic frameworks through which that illness is understood.  Access Arts (https://accessarts.org.au/) - Safe Grant