In 2022 I was commissioned by The Dresden Dolls and Amanda Palmer to create a series of artworks for their 2023, 2024 and 2025 shows. My work with Amanda and the band has been extraordinary and transformative. I have continued working in collaboration with Amanda to create artworks with meaning and purpose, and poster works for her solo shows. Our collaborations never fail to improve my work.

My collaboration with Amanda Palmer and The Dresden Dolls began with a single work: Keeper of Light, created in 2022. It was been inspired by Amanda, whose writing I have long admired, having been introduced to the Dolls’ music in about 2010. I was listening to her reading The Art of Asking as I made it.

I sent it without any expectation, just as a personal thank you, not knowing if it would ever be seen. What followed was unexpected: a response, a connection, and an ongoing creative dialogue.

In 2024, I sent Keeper to Amanda. It has since been used on her Patreon, and a special screen-printed edition was also produced in gold and silver, for a solo show. A photograph of her holding the work marks the moment this exchange became something tangible.

“It was a dark time when I messaged Amanda Palmer and sent her a pictureI had made, which she’d inspired.  Her writing… her art, her grace under fire, her vulnerability, her wisdom, were, and have long been, a source of strength and courage to me.Little did I imagine she’d have the energy to respond the way she did, given how much she was dealing with. Even less did I expect what came from it…a suggestion and then a collaboration.”
— personal notes, 2022

What followed grew slowly — through conversation, trust, and a shared language that continues to evolve.

This body of work was created during a period of profound personal transition. It forms part of a wider practice concerned with fragmentation and reconstruction — not as metaphor alone, but as lived experience.

These works are not literal. They are spaces where something broken is not erased, but transformed, transmuted, reassembled through the alchemy of art and connection.

In Unison is a series of six works created for The Dresden Dolls’ reunion tour.

The works were developed in close alignment with the band’s visual and emotional language, and the punk cabaret ethos, where theatricality, intimacy, rupture, and raw expression coexist.

The series explores ruin and reconstruction, survival and reinvention, love, loss, and return and community and resilience.

A central reference point within the work is the bombed ruins of Dresden and Berlin, and the Trümmerfrauen, the women who rebuilt cities from the wreckage of war. This became a defining metaphor: the act of rebuilding, piece by piece, from devastation.

Recurring visual elements, fractured architecture, fire, light, and theatrical figures, form a symbolic language that moves between destruction and renewal.

“I learned so much from my conversations with Amanda while working on these, and they images contain elements deeply personal to both of us, I think. The ruins you can see in some of the images are churches bombed in Berlin and Dresden during World War 2, which she showed me. She told me of the Trümmerfrauen…the women who wandered through the wreckage of post-WW2 Germany collecting what they could and rebuilding with their bare hands. It became a powerful metaphor for me as I tried in the dying days of 2022 to start rebuilding my own life from the wreckage of life and soul left by the Covid years.

We worked with themes of reunion, renewal, love, destruction, passion, survival, victory, celebration, community…..”

— personal notes, 2022

Alongside In Unison, I have created additional works for both The Dresden Dolls and Amanda Palmer’s solo performances, spanning multiple live shows.

The final works on this page are independent pieces that were not used by the band, but were created in response to and inspired by this collaboration and Amanda.

She has been a muse, a generous friend, and a significant source of support during some of the most challenging years of my life, and that influence runs quietly through this body of work.

Some of these works may already feel familiar to those who have encountered them through performances, releases, or Amanda’s Patreon.

COLLABORATION

The works you see here move between independent creation and collaborative exchange — some developed directly in dialogue with Amanda Palmer and The Dresden Dolls, while others are existing works of mine that were later selected by them for use in performances, releases, and editions. Still others are a combination of these, where a work is selected and specifically remade with Amanda.

This interplay between independent practice and shared development forms a central dynamic of the work.

ONGOING WORK

The collaboration continues to evolve. Selected works have been used as official tour visuals and released as limited editions, with our most recent work forthcoming.

For the magical  community who follow Amanda’s Patreon, the Dolls’ music, the performances, and the world around them: these works belong to them, in spirit. They, along with Amanda, Brian and their team, have been a key reason to keep on going, when the lights  dimmed.