Good evening. It’s been another exhilarating day at the Slowly Downward Manufactory, where I’ve been numbering prints. Oh yes, the fun never stops around here. But what prints have I been numbering? Well, there are two of them; one’s called wait here, we will come for you and it looks like this:

The edition is 122 prints, and each will be priced at £111, including postage and packing. Is nice, yes?

The other print, holding hands, looks like this:

And again, the edition is 122 prints and they’ll be £111, including the P and the P. For the online retailing of these I will be opening a little electronic corner shop next week. 77 prints of each edition will be available as I’d like to keep hold of the rest for exhibitions and things like that. There will be more details forthcoming shortly; those who subscribe to my irregular ‘News From Nowhere’ advertising missives will get all the details that way, and I’ll make some sort of gnomic statement on twitter and the old instagram.

I’ve run out of wine so I’m going now.

Hello. Once again, I must apologise for the lack of up-dates here on my stupid blog. Real events out there in the actual world have occupied my time, at least to the extent that I’ve not felt like keeping a diary. Although perhaps I should have. Anyway, so – what’s a-going on, then?

Well, firstly, I’ve spent a while making some new prints, which are called wait here, we will come for you, and holding hands. Since I made the artwork for the 2015 Glastonbury Festival I’ve kind of had the moon in my head a bit, so they’ve both got the moon in them. I haven’t had them photographed yet, but there are some details over on my Instagram ‘feed’. Actually, that reminds me, I haven’t even written about the artwork I did for Glastonbury! Well, it was ages ago now so you won’t care anyway. All you need to know is that the Dalai Lama (yes) put it on his head to shelter from the rain. And it was called moons over Pilton and it looked like this:

And yes. The Dalai Lama. That particular event made the Daily Mail, you know. The Daily Mail.

Sorry to digress. So, right, you may be interested to hear that I’m opening another of my minuscule ‘web-shops’ pretty soon, and both wait here... and holding hands will be available within its gleaming digital portals. But nothing else. Not until I get my Zmas Boutique sorted out, anyway.

Right, what else is going on/has gone on but I forgot to tell anyone? Er. There will be another opportunity, or an opportunity, to see the artwork I did for the novels of JG Ballard. This will be in the Peninsula Gallery in lovely lovely Plymouth, England. There are some details here:

Here are some details.

I did some of the experiments (well, I didn’t do them, Dr Roy Lowry did the clever part) that were photographed and used in the artwork for my Ballard book covers at Plymouth University, of which the Peninsula Gallery is a part. The night before, they’re showing Spielberg’s film of Ballard’s ‘novelised autobiography’ Empire of the Sun, so if you fancy a load of dystopia and a movie with Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson and the versatile Nigel Havers you could do worse than going all the way to the edge of Cornwall. And why not. I spent about six years there. On the dole.

Apart from those two bits of news everything’s a little vague. Like I said, or at least alluded to, there will be a Zmas Boutique again this year, probably opening in mid-November. And there’ll be another little shop before that. Soon. Other things are happening, but I’m not going to tell you anything about them yet. Watch the skies! or at least, twitter and Instagram. Salut!

The Panic Office, my latest over-ambitious project, was at Carriageworks in Redfern, Sydney, Australia and it’s over now. Over. Gone. It’s been dismantled entirely, and no longer exists.

About three months ago I had great plans for this blog post, but time passed in its usual fashion, events conspired in their usual maddening way, and everything just got too difficult. I am actually genuinely sorry about my lack of ‘up-dates’ on this, the relatively new and technologically accomplished incarnation of what I used to call ‘My Stupid Blog’. In some ways the whole web-log medium feels a bit old-fashioned, as if I’m using a dip-pen (which I have done) or scratching a text on to vellum (which I’ve also done). It’s much easier to flip a load of photos onto instagram or type something obscure onto twitter. So that’s what I’ve been doing – I mean, for the whole time I was in Sydney, putting The Panic Office together, pretty much my only engagement with the online community was instagram and twitter. A bit sad, really. But to be honest, the last thing I felt like doing after a day in a giant warehouse was repeating the experience through the medium of a blog. Yeah, so, sorry about that. The truth is that as soon as I’ve done something I lose a whole chunk of interest in it (even if it was all-consuming in my mind whilst it was going on). Coupled with the fact that I’m a terrible photographer, my record of spending three weeks building a colossal punk Iron Age stockaded fortress in a massive warehouse in Sydney is pathetic.

I did about a million interviews whilst I was there, talking as usefully as I could (ie., not very) so there are things about the show and my idiocy to be found on the internet if you can be bothered to look. I can’t.

Hello. You catch me at a strange time. I’m here in Sydney, an Australian city where the sun shines all winter and the birdsong is the screech of banshees. I’ve decided to give up sleep, as it has abandoned me; I was never entirely sure of the point of it anyway.

The purpose of this post is to solicit submissions – well, votive offerings, really – to a shrine that I’m constructing. I’m here in this place to build a Panic Office. It’s going to be in a place called Carriageworks and is facilitated by an organisation named Semi-Permanent, both of whom appear sufficiently confident and/or deluded that letting me do what I want is in some way a good idea. And in the very centre of this Panic Office will be a Shrine of Bear, a room devoted to the pointy-toothed bear that has become either my trademark or the cartoon albatross that circles my derelict ship as it idles endlessly in the Doldrums.

Anyway, it’s your turn now. I want you to send me photographs of your drawings of The Bear. I want photographs of your Bear cakes, your Bear teddy bears, Bear ear-rings, Bear suits, Bear sushi, Bear tattoos – anything Bear – and I’ll print it out and attach it to the interior of the Shrine of Bear.

Here’s the address: stanleydonwood@semipermanent.com

If you’d like an idea of how I want the Shrine to look, try typing ‘stalker shrine’ into a reputable search engine. You’ll see.

Ok, right, I’m off to cry about the political situation in my home country.

I fucking love John Cooper Clarke. For most of my life he was the only poet I gave a fuck about, and that’s mostly because of a poem he wrote and performed called ‘Evidently Chickentown‘. It’s a work of enduring charm, and if you’re an English teacher trying to get kids to appreciate a bit of fucking poetry I recommend that you read them this.

Anyway, Evidently Chickentown must have lurked in my head for about thirty years, because somehow a strange Essex-accented diatribe of sorts has emerged. It hasn’t got as much swearing in it as Chickentown, but that’s only because it’s shorter. And because I’m so middle-class I thought I’d print it using a very upscale household emulsion – Farrow & Ball’s inoffensive ‘Mouse’s Back No. 40’. It’s essentially beige, and won’t even offend anyone at all ever.

It’s one of six prints that will be on sale via the Slowly Downward Manufactory from the 24th April until whenever we close the shop. All six prints are kind of political, if only in intent. It’s to coincide with the fucking elections in the UK. Little bit of politics, ladies and gentlemen, as Ben Elton used to say before he went all rubbish.

Hey, thanks to everyone who came to the opening night/private view/whatever they’re called of Dream Cargo at the Lawrence Alkin gallery the other night. I had a kind of fun time in the end, after anaesthetising my dread with wine and cigarettes. Everything looks really clinical, which is all to the good. I’ve not displayed work in this way before; each image has been produced as a lambda print, which is a more analogue than digital process, and diasec-mounted, which means the print is fused between layers of steel and perspex. I don’t know the details because it’s a secret and the people who do it won’t tell me. Anyway, it looks fucking great.

There’s a diasec-mounted lambda print of all 21 artworks; these are 660mm x 420mm, and have no text on them. There are also less expensive giclée prints available, again of each of the 21 covers; these are 450mm x 287mm and have Ballard’s name and the title of the book on them.

Like so.

Anyway, at the risk of playing a lengthy solo on my very own trumpet, it’s worth a visit. The gallery is on New Compton Street, near St Giles Church and practically in the shadow of Centre Point at the end (or is it the beginning?) of Oxford Street in dear old London. Click here to be launched to the gallery’s website.

Some years past I became the boss of a record company called Six Inch Records, because I was under the impression that it would be a good idea to have a hobby. I thought it would be an easy gig, all expense accounts and cocaine, but no. And I was wrong about a hobby being a good idea too. But anyway, I released three records, all in editions of 333, for £6.66 each, and in its pointless and futile way it was a success. All the records were sold, and we had a launch party where I took the opportunity to sack all my artistes, and myself.

Five years later, when I thought I was out of danger, I ended up discussing making a pop video with one of my erstwhile acts, The Joy of Living. The band proposed that the video should be made out on the Broomway, an utterly bleak place on the Essex coast, where low tide reveals a barely-perceptible footpath across the treacherous mudflats of Maplin Sands to the deserted island of Foulness. Aside from the very real risk of drowning or being swallowed by the mud, the place has been used as a firing range for missiles for decades, and is littered with unexploded bombs.

Here is what the website for the Broomway has to say: “Walking the Broomway is exceptionally dangerous, because navigation in such self-similar terrain is difficult even in good conditions of visibility, and because the tide comes in extremely fast. It is quite easy to get lost on Maplin Sands, and if a walker gets lost out there he or she is almost certain to drown. So two things are absolutely crucial to a Broomway expedition: a compass, and tide times.”

Last summer I found myself on these notorious mudflats, far from the path itself, with no compass or tide-times, with only two members of The Joy of Living, two film-makers, a dancer, a video camera, and a large box. The band members, the dancer and myself were wearing large animal heads made of felt – there was a crow, a seagull, a fox (the dancer, Jennifer Essex) and a hare (myself).  The idea was that the crow and the seagull would appear in the far distance, at the flat horizon, in the mist, and walk towards the camera, carrying the large box between them. Upon arriving in front of the camera, they would lower the box to the ground, whereupon the fox would emerge from it, dance for a time before getting back into the box, and then the crow and seagull would carry the box back out into the void. I, as the hare, was required only to ‘mooch about’.

Well, we didn’t get blown up or drown, or I wouldn’t be writing about that strange day now. And the pop video was made. Some time soon The Joy of Living will release a record on vinyl, and post the video on the internet somewhere. I’ve made some drawings for the record sleeve, one of which – of the empty Broomway – is shown above. And more details about this fucking weird project will appear in good time on this very website.

Forgive me for my increasingly infrequent entries here, on my venerable website. I now seem to update my virtual existence by posting pictures and obscure messages on to Twitter and Instagram. I’d never have imagined it, to be honest; I’ve long had a deeply held distrust and a trenchantly cynical view regarding what’s called ‘social media’, but it’s got me, just like it’s got pretty much everyone else. But still, I offer my apologies.

Anyway, anyway. As you can see from just above, I have an exhibition opening soon in London, which will be showing the artwork I made for JG Ballard’s novels. It’s at the Lawrence Alkin gallery, near Centre Point at the eastern end of Oxford Street. There will be some sort of opening event on the evening of Thursday 26th March, and it might be an idea to get in touch with the gallery to find out about that. Me, I have no idea.

It was a tremendous honour to be asked to create the covers for JG Ballard’s books. He’s possibly my favourite author of the 20th (and a bit of the 21st) century, and someone whose books I’ve reread loads of times. To my mind, his incredibly incisive take on his childhood and his childhood observations made him one of the most prescient students of humanity as it dwelt in the strange edifice of late-period Western capitalism. Who else but Ballard could have begun a novel with the image of an urban professional devouring the remains of a dog on the balcony of his luxury penthouse apartment?

The exhibition will be showing extremely limited Diasec mounted lambda prints of the artwork I produced for the 21 covers. Smaller giclée editions of each will also be available.

I’m going to resurrect these feral bastards. All fourteen of them. Ranged around the boardroom table, presided over by the goat’s head I nailed to a dartboard. The goat boardroom will rise again. In Australia. More news soon.

I think it was last week (although it could have been the week before) that I printed the linocut edition of the smeuse at Richard Lawrence’s workshop. That edition will be available, somehow and some time, through Penguin books, but I don’t know when. The days have passed in a strange mist of insomnia and now myself and Comrade Winstanley have completed the edition of screen prints of the Smeuse. As you can see, it includes a flower; a snowdrop, to be precise. I’ve never done a flower before, and I don’t know what it means that I’ve done one now. Perhaps I am mellowing with age, like a dodgy home-made vodka, and next I’ll do a cute little kitten.  Who knows, pop kids? Anything could happen.

Once we have printed the Dark Mountain edition and another print that’s in production called Moon Road we will be opening a new online boutique, which will be retailing these three new screen prints as well as some other work. Watch this space, innit.