This body of work formed during the early expansion of the internet as a dominant cultural territory, when digital space still felt unstable, porous and partially unmappable. Search engines promised total access, yet whole regions of information remained invisible through mis-tagging, broken indexing, deliberate exclusion and automated error. These hidden zones became contemporary equivalents of terra incognita.

I began to think of the internet as an electrical sea, a space of scale beyond human comprehension. Navigation relied on fragile instruments, partial maps and myths formed from glitch. Like early cartography, its edges were marked by fear, desire, speculation and projection as much as by knowledge.

I took on the role of an information privateer, wandering the margins of searchable culture. What I gathered were not facts but anomalies. Broken images. Collapsed narratives. Hybrid figures. Digital relics that resisted stable classification. These fragments were translated through hand processes into drawing, collage, paint, erasure and digital montage. Pixels folded into paper. Data drifted into gesture. Figures appeared as silhouettes, absences, composites and repeated ghosts. Mapping language remained present, but its promise of clarity consistently failed.

Across this period, the monstrous did not operate only as threat. It functioned as a figure of othering that revealed how systems produce exclusion. What falls outside legibility is often made monstrous through neglect, distortion or structural blindness. Monsters marked the fault lines where meaning fractured.

A series of shrine-based works emerged as part of this investigation. Figures such as Princess Diana, Freddy Krueger, Rambo and Princess Leia were folded into devotional structures that blurred pop icon, fairy tale, martyr and monster. Diana appeared as a naïvely painted half-deer, half-catalogue collage figure, paired with offerings of Fruit Loops and lollies. Freddy received mince. These shrines were tender and grotesque at once. Offerings were sincere and ridiculous in equal measure. They asked how myth, desire, fear and consumption braid together in everyday life.

A Meditation on Consumption at George Paton Gallery in 2005 formed an early threshold into this thinking. By the time Monsters Lie Here consolidated, the work had moved more fully into hybrid information itself as a living force. Glitch became a way of thinking. Mismatch became a method. Myth emerged from error as much as from design.

Across this body of work, boundaries repeatedly dissolved. Digital and physical reproduction collapsed into one another. Fiction leaked into documentation. Science fiction braided with domestic ritual. The monstrous became less about spectacle and more about the disorientation that arises when systems no longer cohere as promised.

By the end of this period, the question shifted. The work no longer asked only where monsters live, but how they migrate, soften and become familiar.

The images from Monsters Lie Here lead directly into Dawn of R.A.M. Hybrid figures, ritual offerings and unstable mythologies reorganise into larger speculative structures. The monsters do not disappear.

They move.