Serpentine, 2021, 400x400mm, collage, watercolour and metallic pigments on Khadi handmade paper

I’m grateful for the opportunity for these works to be seen together on this platform and in this format. They have a complex backstory but up front it seems relevant to say that they are part of a vast longform project at whose heart is poetry. Sacred, sacriligious, sexy, steadfast poetry.

All these collages are part of CREATION, an artwork in the form of a queer insurrectionary science fiction climate change religion which I’ve been working on with other artists since 2019. The religion proceeds from a text I commissioned from artist SJ Norman called the Liturgy of the Saprophyte, and some of these artworks were made as part of calling-into-being of that liturgy, and others were made to accompany and amplify its resonances.

The Holy Orders of CREATION are the Serpent, the Rat, Fungus, Bacteria, the Vulture and the Spider, whose companions are the Moon and Infinity.

Like the accretive and trans-historical aspects of collage, CREATION is built on the bones of its ancestral faith traditions, particularly the most gothic incarnation of Catholicism, as well as origin stories of the ancient Greeks and Sumerians, Wiccans and various queer exuberances. SJ Norman is a Wiradjuri person and his liturgy also invokes Indigenous theologies through its sensibilities, tenets and foundation, however this holiness is not reflected in the iconography.

The ABC made a documentary about CREATION in 2025 and it can be viewed here. The Book of Creation contains the liturgy, a suite of commissioned poetry, songs and stories as well as many artworks, and it can be purchased here.