This work has come about through a shift from making non-linear series’ of images to experimenting with sequential narrative. Moving towards narrative has in fact been a matter of repositioning myself in relation to my work’s existing direction: I would identify the active ingredient in all my work – past and present – as the urge to tell stories. Having used narrative imagery for a number of years with an approach that owed much to the painter Ken Kiff, it was an encounter with Anke Feuchtenberger’s extraordinary illustrated books that confirmed authorial illustration as an area that I wanted to explore in my own work. Where painters like Kiff use narrative as a central element in their practice, Feuchtenberger is more literally a teller of stories: it is through the sequential organisation of the imagery that the content of the individual images is unfolded. I have found that employing this simple change of priorities in my working process has opened up a whole new imaginative territory, one that I look forward to exploring more fully in a series of books revolving around the same themes as The Bird’s Dream.