New Things 2026
Light Festival, Pebbles, Lichen Field Guides
Hello! First newsletter of 2026. Here are a few recent happenings and things going on.
JELLYMONSTER
Some of you might remember this interactive piece I was experimenting with last year. If you missed it, I was playing around with using code to make interactive characters that would respond visually to different inputs. This particular one, Jellymonster, reacts to sound, so it wibbles and changes colour depending on different sound frequencies.
Fun news! Next month Jellymonsters will be premiering at Bristol Light Festival!
And not just one Jellymonster, but two of them, projected to a massive size on the side of a big brewery here in Bristol. There will be external mics set up on the bridge overlooking them, so passersby can sing, wail, hum, or do whatever they want to see what happens. Very fun! I’ve tweaked their designs a bit too, so hopefully it’ll feel like you’re really communicating with them up there.
The festival runs from the 19th to the 28th of Feb in Bristol, UK. Quite excited because the scale is huge and it’s a new thing for me. Plus, as a longtime visitor to the light festival, I’m very proud to be a part of it. I’ll make sure to take lots of photos and videos and report back.
PEBBLE
When I was figuring out how the projection for the Jellymonsters would work, I had an idea to do some very lofi projection mapping onto real objects. Maybe that sounds a bit complicated….. what I mean is putting faces onto pebbles.
I wanted a voice for one of the pebbles to speak. For reasons unknown Tim Key follows me on instagram. I thought I’d send him a message and ask if he’d do it. He replied ‘yeah probs’ and so I quickly wrote a few lines for him and he sent over the recording. Anyway. Funny story. And now this exists.
LICHEN GUIDES
Did I ever mention these? I wanted to make these field guides based on the lichen characters I made a million years ago. After a bit of back and forth with publishers I decided to self publish them. Hey, diy till I die, right?
They are pocket sized and feature 18 different common lichens and have some facts and habitat info about each one. It was fact checked by Alexandra Nobre, a biology professor at the university of Minho in Portugal.
They’re currently stocked in a bunch of great shops in the UK (stockist list on my site here) and I’m going to look at expanding that this year. Shipping overseas has proven a little complicated, but hopefully in the future.
Stay tuned for the next field guide hopefully coming later this year. A clue: I’m not mossing about.
😍
Maria Popova, who writes The Marginalian (https://www.themarginalian.org), and is also a picture book author, would love the lichen field guides! If you search "lichen" on her site you'll see she's written extensively about it. I feel like a collaboration is just dying to take place.