CONFIDENTIAL REPORT: SUBJECT – “GLOAMRATS” (FERAL YOUTH COLLECTIVE)

Date: ██████████

Report ID: ██████████

Status: LEAKED

Summary:

The following is a █████████████████ compiled by operatives of the Gildspoke Foundation regarding the emergence and activities of the urban collective known as “the Gloamrats.” This group, composed of ████████████, has established itself as a persistent anomaly within ███████████████.

Key Observations:

Territorial Occupation: The Gloamrats appear to have claimed ████████████████████████, particularly the ruins around ██████████ and the collapsed █████████████████. Movements suggest a ████████████ structure or ██████████ influence.

Language and Symbol Use: Strange sigils and glyph-like markings have been recorded in █████████████████. These appear to serve a ██████████ function. Attempts to decipher the ██████████ have thus far failed.

Behavioral Anomalies: ████████████████████████████████. In multiple cases, Foundation drones were ██████████ or diverted via █████████. Operatives describe subjects navigating in ████████████, suggesting ██████████ or ████████████████████.

Myth-Bonding: The group’s oral folklore includes ████████████████████████████. Recurring references include “the Black-Eyed Sister,” “Ratspeaker,” and ██████████████. These may indicate ████████████████████████████████████.

Recommendations:

• Establish observation points in █████████████████. Avoid exposure.
• Initiate ████████████████████ under controlled parameters.
• DO NOT ATTEMPT direct engagement. See Incident Report ██████████.
• Continued surveillance for Brassmind overlap is ██████████████████.

End of Report

Already Thursday again, eh? Back to 2002 we go… collage days this time, with a piece called “Dreams at the Hollow Veil.”

It’s another one from that same series of surreal landscapes I posted the other week. This one came a bit later on, when I’d started to get the hang of the techniques and it all began to click proper.

Round about then, I remember picking up this mad book of digital art in the discount bin at The Works in Stockport, “The Ten Dimensional Maze” by Ian and Ted Arundell. Came out in ’95, I think. A Lewis Carroll-inspired digital tr1p, full of surreal dream-logic and warped little worlds. (Pretty sure I’ve still got it knocking about somewhere.) Proper strange stuff. Like someone had got Max Ernst talking in riddles to a half-broken AI trapped inside a Commodore Amiga, it had that same uncanny feeling. All noise and nonsense, but beautiful with it.

That book proper lodged itself in my head so I tried to recreate it a bit in paint. Felt like it was speaking the same language I was trying to paint at the time—turning mess into mood, randomness into something meaningful.

Same as the others in the series, I was working with frottage / grottage, smears, scrapes, just letting the textures lead the way. Seeing what forms crawled out of the noise. Every now and then, something would show itself and I’d think, “…that’s it.” Then I’d pull it back a touch, start chopping bits out, gluing and sticking, adding some sharper edges and cut-up elements to give it more of that fractured, geometric vibe in places.

Looking back now, it does feel a bit like I accidentally collaborated with some half-sentient, glitchy AI from the ‘90s—maybe A.L.I.C.E or Eliza, or even N.I.A.L.L—who got stuck inside a beige wedge Amiga 1200, whispering strange dreams through 2mb RAM, glue, static and pixel dust. As long as it doesn’t try to steal my art and flog it as a Vintage Deluxe Paint

WIP… but this painting’s nearly finished now, my first oil piece in quite a number of years. It’s been a strange kind of reunion. I usually work digitally these days (tablets, layers, quick edits, overpainting photos, composites, undo buttons… what’s not to love?), but something in me wanted to pick up a brush again and see what happened.

It was a bit tricky at first. Oils are much slower, less forgiving – once it’s down, it’s down, and I had to re-learn a few things. But once I found the rhythm, it all came back. Maybe like catching up with a messy, smelly old friend you haven’t seen in ages but still somehow know.

My main issue this time was canvas size, way too small for how I like to paint. Next time I’ll go bigger, or maybe even go back to making DIY canvases out of cardboard and sacking. Might be fun. I’d like a bit more texture to paint on than what you get from those flat, shop-bought ones.

The Gloamrats have made their way into this picture now, a group of small, damp, paper-crowned figures slinking through a rainy ginnel behind Mill Street. The whole scene’s soaked in that damp, forgotten Harrowden atmosphere I love: slick cobbles, dripping brickwork, and that eerie stillness you only get in backstreets when the rain’s coming down.

Just a few finishing touches left now, and then I’ll let it sit and dry before sharing the final piece with you fine folk. Been good to step back into this kind of making – even if the digital realm is still where I feel most at home.

Update from the excavation today! We found it the end.

We set off near the old mill site, thinking we were close, but nothing quite matched what my dad described. Some crumbling walls, but not the place where the “soot stones” were chucked down into the river. So we kept going, climbing through the woods, got feet soaked in bog water and we followed the little stream round hoping it’d lead us to something.

By the time we got near the road, I was ready to ring me dad for more clues as still no sign…

Then my mate clocked it, an old rusted industrial cart, half-drowned in a pool of stinking stagnant still water. Just above it, a proper steep banking sloping down. Looked like nothing at first, but then it hit us, this was it. This must be the spot.

We started digging and within seconds, there they were! black burnt rusted metal ball bearings, still solid after all these years. Fire-born and buried, just waiting for someone daft enough as us to come looking. We raked a fair few out and bagged them up, despite my dog being a right menace the whole time. 🤣 Then scrambled back out through the undergrowth, soaked, muddy, buzzing!

Climbing out, we saw a kids’ rope swing dangling off one of the trees. Folk still play there just like my dad did maybe 60 years ago! Past and present, swinging side by side.

Can’t wait to use these for me new art Harrowden piece I’m doing, pairing them up with the other relics I dug out from the old coal power station site. Two fire-specimens from two forgotten furnaces, coming together. Proper Harrowden stuff! The kind of material that remembers where it came from…
“The ground never forgets.”

This bank holiday I’m heading out with a friend to dig… not just into the ground, but into fire, memory, and myth. It’s part of a new Harrowden art piece, but the line between fiction and the real world is burning thin here… excuse me while we snap a little back to reality…

My dad told me about this old cotton mill where they used to chuck “soot stones” straight down a steep banking into the river, hot black lumps, ball baring size fire spat out the furnace, still crackling. There was no bother for pollution or health and safety back then. Just tip it in, let the river take it… He said him and his mates used to play on the slope, slipping down it like it were a playground in the 60’s…

We’ve managed to piece it together and found the spot on google and an old map, the actual mill has gone now but it looks like it’s still wasteland, sat by another set of abandoned mills still there. We’re going to try excavating this Saturday. If it’s anything like the “big crackleblacks” we found from the last remains of the old coal power station early this week, it might still be there, buried cinders waiting to be brought to the surface.

In Harrowden, these are called Crackleblack, industrial relics that hum with leftover heat, fossilised labour, the detritus of soot-belching machines, the history of one thousand hard shifts. I want to collect them, preserve them, build something from their smouldering silence.

There is also another personal story in this place we are going. Just across the river from the site is where my gran arrived from Ireland, a teenage girl entering the country with forged documents from her village priest. She came to work the mills, and stayed in Mill lodging in a place called “The Bleachery”. She’d send money home as Ireland was dirt poor back then and her mother had younger mouths to feed. A fire… this time not in the ground, but burning in her need to survive, to shape something better out of cotton, cinder and ash. And why I am here…

The mills and cotton run through my family, we all worked in the textiles factories including myself…

So yep… its an art piece, But it’s a bit like digging through cinders to find where I come from… An act of remembrance… An excavation of family, flame, and forgotten furnaces.

I’ll keep you folk updated and post what we find, if the land’s in a giving mood! 🖤❤️

This week, I’m digging back to October 2016, a time when I was deep into pen and ink, lost in lines and textures. Most of what I was working on then ended up as screen prints on some pretty spicy tees, but this particular series was a little side thing. No pressure, no product, just a fun, sketchbook-fuelled experiment.

I was messing around with portrait styles from the early 1900s, trying to mash Edwardian elegance with a bit of punk defiance. Think Charles Dana Gibson’s high-society ladies, but with piercings, patches, and an attitude problem. I spent hours studying his work, those ridiculously detailed curls, sharp features, and over-the-top poise and then scribbling my own versions where they looked like they’d just walked out of a squat gig instead of a parlour.

Spent the afternoon diving into a proper painting for the first time in a long while, and back to oils, no less. Picked up a fresh canvas this morning, on a bit of a whim.

Before I moved over to digital, I used to work a lot in traditional media charcoal, ink, collage, and of course, oils. I use to love doing huge expressive paintings with a brush, but it’s just something I gradually drifted away from really, especially working day jobs where I mostly do digital art. These days I mostly use my tablet (with layers, undo buttons, over painting and all that good stuff), but it felt right today to return to something more tactile.

This piece is still a work in progress, maybe halfway through. Not gone too badly, considering half the oil paints had gone strange on me, and I was working with nothing but big daubin’ brushes.

I’ve got some new paint and brushes on the way, so once they arrive I’ll start tightening it up and bringing in more detail. I reckon there’ll be a few Gloamrats sneakin’ about in this one, possibly a cat watching from the shadows.

It’s rough, it’s unpredictable, and I’ve missed it. Just wish I had more time, it’s a much slower process.

Every spring in in Harrowden, when the chimneys belch blacker than usual, they come… nothing is official, like. No fliers, no town notice. But folk know. They always know, when it is, it comes with a hush leading up to it that settles over Harrowden like damp fog.

Just as we think we’ve made it through winter’s grip… just as the days stretch long… then comes the Blackheart Friday Parade…

Some say it was rooted in the strikes, others claim it goes back to when the moors were worshipped and the bogs were sacred.

Ain’t like no parade you’d boast or clap for. Figures cloaked in rags rubbed black with mill ash, faces covered with masks stitched from sackcloth, burnt lace, cracked doll-heads. Lanterns made from bones and rusted old tin cans swing from chains. The gloamrats and other young’uns march ahead, wearing paper crowns too damp to hold shape. There’s no music as such, the soundtrack is these strange droning booming sound systems pulled on carts, singing industrial noise like frantic ghosts remembering the factories of old.

It’s a protest, some say. A warning, say others. But the older people reckon it’s an old pact kept barely alive. An appeasement for what sleeps down by Gallows Bog, for what happened… Either way, folk shutter early. The Velvet Toad closes up, pretending it never existed, the rich, landlords and mill owners nowhere to be found.

What sets most uneasy ain’t what walks, it’s what floats. Look up, and there they are: the Varnlings. Massive, drifting’ shapes gliding through the sky like oily smears on the clouds, dripping thick black as if the sky itself were weeping soot. They make no sound, but their presence hangs like a held breath. No one knows if they follow the parade or if they are in fact leading it. But they always come, drifting like rot in the wind.

Some folk reckon they first showed when them from Frostmere drifted in, salt in their lungs and secrets in their eyes, but don’t pay too much attention to that there’s always been a strange chill between Harrowden and Frostmere folk. A sense that they don’t quite belong, no matter how long they’ve been here.

And so it goes, every year. The Blackheart Friday Parade comes, a strange and twisted ritual woven into the very fabric of Harrowden’s dark heart. It’s something talked about, yet no one dares understand fully. Perhaps it’s better left as it is, a reminder of the town’s restless past, of old divisions and things better left unspoken.

It’s throwback time, and this week I’m revisiting a project close to my heart: The Product by Black Light Mutants, originally released in 2017.

I’ve shared bits from this one before, but thought I’d dig a little deeper and show some of the promo artwork—done in that dystopian digital photo-composite style I was really into at the time. Think fractured cityscapes, industrial decay, warped perspective and a whole lot of texture. Chaos, but intentional.

Back in 2017, I co-created this release with the anarchopunk/electronic band Black Light Mutants, writing music, lyrics, vocals, and also handling all the artwork and promotional design. This was The Product.

The whole aesthetic was built to feel like a fever-dream of industrial collapse—survivors trudging through the wreckage of a broken system, a city feeding on itself. The music and visuals were our way of responding to everything we felt was rotting from the inside out: politics, media, commodification, control.

Produced in Manchester, it was glitch-heavy noise meets punk grit—plus all the weird genre hybrids we were experimenting with at the time. The cover art? That was a visual extension of the same rage. Poisoned skies. Collapsing structures. Wires like veins. Everything on the brink.

This was a total DIY production—raw, honest, and snarling.
Here’s to remembering that energy.

Listen here: blacklightmutants.bandcamp.com

So… am I too late for this whole doll trend that’s been circling social media like a moth round a strip light?

Probably.

’Cause I raided my mum’s cupboards and went full Blue Peter, didn’t I!

Knocked up my own “Cut Out & Dress Up” vintage-style paper doll with cardboard, sticky back plastic, and a good dose of Harrowden weirdness.

She’s none other than Lenore Blackwell, the moody lass from your soot-smeared dreams, complete with walkman, tape, dog collar, safety pin and her DIY denim jacket.

She’s joined by two of the red-eyed Harrowden cats, creeping out the corners like they know too much (because they probably do).

Might make a few more. We’ll see. 🖤

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