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.

The Hollow Humor exhibition at Natalie Galustian Rare Books in Cecil Court closes on the 31st January. If you’ve not been, there are paintings including Winterfold (above) and prints from the book Holloway and Humor. Most of the work is on display downstairs, whilst upstairs is the bookshop; taken over these past few months by the Faber Social pop-up shop, selling the complete list of Faber’s music and film-connected list. And, of course, my very own Humor, in both regular hardback and doubleplusgood hemp special limited edition…

Natalie Galustian Rare Books, 22 Cecil Court, London, WC2N 4HE. It might be an idea to phone ahead if you’re going out of your way: 020 7240 6822

My apologies for the lack of ‘updates’ on this recently. There was a holiday or something. It’s all a bit hazy. Anyway, I’ve been over at Richard Lawrence’s workshop, printing what will form the cover of the next journal from Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain project. Paul read from his novel The Wake at the Faber Social I curated back in November, and the Dark Mountain project is, weirdly perhaps, how I came to hear of him in the first place. It’s very interesting but I don’t think that I, hampered as I am by a flippant and casual attitude, can explain it very well, so you’re best of clicking the link just above. Anyway, I did a linocut for the cover over the hazy holiday, and this is what it looks like.

I’m intending to make a screen print from it, by the way, as a companion piece to the one I’m making of the linoleum smeuse I cut for the cover of Robert Macfarlane’s new book Landmarks, which is, incidentally, published on March 6th 2015. I’m sure I’ve explained what a ‘smeuse’ is elsewhere, but if I haven’t, it’s a hole made in the bottom of a hedge by the repeated passage of a small animal. Nice, hey? Anyway, here’s the smeuse:

I’ve already finished the artwork for the screen print of this, and I’ll be printing that very soon. And it will be on the new Slowly Downward Manufactory webshop, along with some other new things, if I get it together. Never mind; here it is on the drying rack…

This is an edition of ten, which will be available exclusively from Penguin at some time, probably around the publication of Landmarks. I will endeavour to keep you posted about that; if not here then on the twitter or the instagram. And hapy n yr and all that.

Fucking elves. I thought elves were supposed to do all the work at this time of year, but no luck. I don’t know if there’s an agency or something, but if there is no-one told me about it. So in the absence of elves, myself and the long-suffering Comrade Winstanley have been in the Manufactory for days, in temperatures that beggar belief, printing, smoking and refurbishing the Zmas Boutique in a fetching shade of forced optimism. Yes, we tell each other, everything is going to be just great.

Anyway, the point of me sitting here, typing into this infernal machine, is to tell you, o beauteous public, that the Boutique now offers some new work, including a Golden Solstice Smeuse, an Insane Minotaur, a Treasure Island Sunset, and an antique piece which is, for reasons lost somewhere in the last years of the Twentieth Century, called Else.

Bon voyage, and don’t forget to turn out the lights on your way out. Salut, and happy zmas.