V isual Visual

Director’s Gallery, Royal Geographical Society
12 June to 16 August 2026

The new collages by Steph on display arose from an intimate study of historic maps, many from the Royal Geographical Society collections, including seventeenth-century vellum portolan charts and historic atlases. They provided both material and inspiration. Handling maps hand-drawn on calf skin led him to consider the similarities between these depictions of landmasses and seas and the bodies of mammals, especially humans, with their liquids and solids, entry and exit points, contours and incursions; it seemed as if the cartographers had explored those similarities too. Many of the historic atlases he examined also contain illustrations of battles on land and sea, reminders of conflict and bloodshed which felt far from historic. The critical bodily health of the world’s lands and seas was also hard to ignore.

His process involved exploring anagrams, negatives/positives, shadows, inversions and reflections and the simple syntax of collage: what happens when you place disparate things alongside each other to create a new grammar. As well as maps from previous centuries, this frequently involved material such as cookbooks and gardening manuals from previous decades.

Exhibition, October / November 2023 at Parlour Gallery, Deptford, London, taking its title from a large wall piece painted with stencils straight on the wall, tackling Steph’s childhood homophobic trauma in the 1970s via ‘All the names’, in a genre he is calling ‘confessional concrete’. Opposite it are collages which see ‘Walter the Softy’ from The Beano comic enjoying life as an out-and-proud arty, sissy, flower-loving, book reading gay boy.

Smaller visual and concrete poems intervene elsewhere in the space.

Prints of the wall piece are available, and both originals and prints of the collages are also for sale.

concrete poem ‘Bridge’ featured in Streetcake Magazine 85

This picture is excerpt – see the magazine for the full image/poem

three of my visual pantoums (vispans?) featured in the wonderful, beautiful Mercurius magazine. Hope to have prints of these to sell soon.

My black-out poem ‘UK Government you take…’ featured in Strukturriss magazine, buy it here.

My concrete poem ‘The River Ravensbourne…” was a runner up in the 2021 Streetcake Prize and featured in their 2021 anthology: buy it here!

Also my black-out poem ‘Uk Government you cannot…’ was included in the May 2022 Streetcake Magazine, Issue 78, Part II.

Three of my visual poems were featured in the wonderful, much-missed, Beir Bua Journal.

‘Early Stages’, ‘FAQs of Gardens’, ‘Clematis has the last laugh’ and other poems in a poetry installation, Bonnington Square, London, 2016, for Poetry School’s ‘Mixed Borders’.

‘Early Stages’ later published online in Helen Ivory’s Ink Sweat and Tears online magazine, and ‘FAQs of Gardens’ later published in the anthology Write to be Counted.

‘Keep calm and cross off’ along with other poems presented as menus in the courtyard café at House of Saint Barnabas for ‘Mixed Borders’. Crossrail runs beneath the house, which is close to Centrepoint, at Tottenham Court Road underground, London.

Hand-out to accompany one-day residency at London Open Garden Squares Weekend 2019, Nomura International.

Collage translation of a collage poem by Herta Müller from the book Die Blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen.