Marriage of Life and Death, Sunlight on linen, 117cm x 150cm 2025
Ghost of a Flea, Cyanotype on canvas, 117cm x 150cm 2025.
Working with the conviction of pragmatic improvisation (a phrase collaged from Fred Moten’s ideas) opens into the reconciliation of life and death. Like a song, this process disrupts the tired sequence of conceptual intention. I tried to make the diagram paintings in this book with a feeling of being on the cusp of a useful discovery. Making improbably large photographic canvases of the ideas kept control at bay.
The book has a key motif of the capitalist vampire with Blake’s Ghost of a Flea acting as an imaginative repost. How fitting that I spent this Summer preparing canvases out of the sun and then exposing them for five minutes (watching the Vampires du UX crumble into dust). Blake has been the region where Tony and I have gathered our thoughts and here we have both felt his cosmic resonances. Blake’s interweaving of Joy and Woe (or his Marriage of Heaven and Hell) has been the perfect model for making images that refuse pain-free clarity.
I became immersed in Blake’s cosmos about the time the author Tony Sampson became my doctoral supervisor. As with my other footholds (Whitehead and Deleuze) it felt better to understand Blake inside the refrain of the song. I’m far from an expert but I have curated several exhibitions celebrating his 3-year sojourn in Felpham. Blake’s uncompromising position regarding a fundamental right to shape meaning in aesthetic experience has allowed me to make diagrams without feeling I am simply visualising information. These are Diagrams for ritual meaning-making.
The Struggle for Selfie, Sunlight on linen, 2025
Tony D Sampson (the author)
“The sheer significance of Mikey’s contribution to the development of my new book cannot be underestimated. Following previous collaborations, which established a thrilling foundation of shared creative aesthetic curiosity, we met on a number of occasions to discuss a common underpinning concept for the book. This was a sustained and focused effort, a process of mutual development that required a significant investment of time and intellectual energy from us both. It was through this rigorous, back-and-forth dialogue that we translated our discussions into a cohesive visual strategy—a Burroughsesque cut-up of Blake’s democratizing notion of mystic experience and User Experience (UX) design templates. These sessions were not simply briefings for illustration but started a stimulating dialogue, a collaboration between image and text where Mikey’s work dynamically interacted with the philosophy of the project.
This scholarly partnership was then followed by the immense effort of creative activity. These are not merely sketches depicting a set of ideas or diagrams helping illustrate points made in the text, they are catalytic convertors of concepts – the aestheticization of the text. Each part is the result of a profound engagement with the theory, requiring Mikey to aestheticize complex philosophical arguments into a visual register. Indeed, they function on a different register to the conventional logics of academic discourse and representational art. They are graphical improvisations with the cut-up method, producing a visceral engagement consistent with the book’s philosophy of experimental experience.
The volume of Mikey’s output is a direct reflection of that dedicated process. From over 35 plus images produced, a testament to Mikey’s prolific and dedicated creative process, we have selected 28 for the submitted manuscript. The task of selecting the final images was itself a considerable effort, requiring us to meticulously evaluate how each piece served the book’s intellectual ensemble of themes. These images are now utterly integral to the book’s overall aesthetic; they are not accompaniments but co-conspirators in the thesis, essential to its rhythm and pushing it to a place further than individual authorship can ever go. The final manuscript is a testament to a productive collaboration that demanded (and received) a profound effort from the artist.”
T.S. 17/09/2025
Dr Tony D Sampson, Reader in Digital Communications, Essex University