In the early twentieth century Marcel Duchamp developed the concept of the Ready Made, an object designated the privileged status of art through the choice of the artist. It was primarily through the choices an artist made, Duchamp argued, that art was created. The artist no longer had to make a thing for it to be considered art. In the latter half of the same century the Found Object (where the sculptor does not have to make the sculpture) was joined by the Found Image (the photographer does not have to take the photograph), and the Found Sound (the musician does not have to create the sound), continuing this conceptual movement away from artist as one-who-makes to artist as one-who-discovers, or one-who-draws-attention-to.

To this I would like to add the Found Narrative. For much of this period avant-garde, modernist and post-modernist writers had been searching for alternatives to the limitations imposed by linear narrative structures, what William S. Burroughs referred to as the Beginning-Middle-End narrative. Alongside this, many theorists were questioning the text, the author and the structures of narrative, producing seminal essays such as Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author?” and  Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” Much of my work has been inspired by these writers, artists and theorists, and has been a continuation of this programme to generate new, and novel, narrative forms. The Found Narrative could be seen as a logical extension to this process.

A Found Narrative is an object, series of objects, text, or series of texts, which contain within them the weight of a narrative. It could be as simple as a postcard (Found Narrative No’s 1, 2 and 3), or as complex as a complete card index system within an old wooden filing cabinet discovered in a cottage next to a church (Found Narrative No. 6). A writer may look at these objects as starting points, the inspiration for a story. But I am not interested in writing stories, I am interested in the process of discovering and bringing to attention the stories already contained within the objects I find. I don’t want stories where the author tells the reader everything. A good story (and, indeed, good art) contains gaps which must be filled by the reader (or viewer). A good story requires active participation from the reader, it asks for input from the reader’s imagination. The Found Narratives each contain clues, snippets of information, which invite the reader to construct the links between them, in order that it be the reader who generates the narrative. Again, it was Duchamp who first highlighted this triangular relationship between the artist, the work, and the viewer. The artist needs the viewer to complete the work. Without the participation of the viewer there is no art. This participation is, I believe, a large part of the joy of art. 

The first three Found Narratives are postcards, found left as bookmarks in volumes bought from second-hand bookshops. They read like succinct short stories, leaving the reader with unanswered questions, and placing vivid images into the reader’s mind. But as a reader, I don’t want to be given the answers to these questions, I don’t want the gaps to be filled by a writer. It is the gaps that provide me as a reader with the most pleasure. It is the gaps which also provide a link to other areas of my work, such as the Grid and Tile collages and the book works. How much information can be removed, or indeed how little information do we need, in order to make sense of something? After all, only four per cent of the Universe is made up of visible matter, and yet we are continuously increasing our understanding of it’s overall structure. This sense of discovery, this revealing of layers, becomes more pronounced the further through the series of Found Narratives we progress.

The ongoing Found Narrative Series shows human beings to be natural archivers and recorders, creators and organisers of data, from which, I assume, we must at some point in our development have gained a Darwinian advantage over our competitors. Did the Neanderthals create archives? At what point in our history did Homo sapiens begin generating and storing data? The variety of means through which this compulsion manifests, as a collector, as well as creator, of narratives, and as highlighted by this series, is a continuing source of fascination to me. As I hope it will be to you, the reader.