Goblin Library Dispatch June 2025
I send this dispatch from the Scottish Borders…
May was busy with commissions. I finished the album cover in gouache and the Lavender Menace flier in inks. I was also able to complete a small stock of bread+butter goblins which have carried me through the month on their velvet, orange backs. There was a little bit of a hustle, but I was able to tie up all my loose May ends to leave the city for June.
My incredibly talented girlfriend (@christinabainarts) has been on a residency at The Hugo Burge Foundation for much of June and the beginning of July. Being able to join her is one of those moments when being a freelance illustrator feels like a bit of a gift. There are few jobs that would have allowed me that flexibility and it makes all the other extremely precarious moments feel worth it.
While I can’t talk about what my partner’s been developing yet, my mission on the residency was to make the time to work with her on this burgeoning project in whatever way I could. The Foundation is a strange and beautiful place. We have gathered lychen textures, wild flower pallettes and the flash of hares as they streak across our paths. My practice has always been 2D while her puppet world is very much embedded in a 3 dimensional sketch space. Bringing our worlds together has been extremely rewarding.
It was blisteringly hot when we arrived. The long grasses waving yellow in the heat. The Skyboat sailing though a deep and vacant cornflower sky. When the weather broke though, it shattered. We spent the solstice in the company of the other residency artist and her partner.
We knew a storm was coming but often summer storms on the island can be disappointing. They promise to send me back to those dark, childhood evenings, everything electrical in the house unplugged at my dad’s insistance. Candlelight and crackling air.
They rarely deliver on these promises.
But not this one. We counted between rumbles and flashes until the rain became a cascade and she circled us like a wild thing. Oh, she raged for hours roaring and tearing at the purple sky with her white-fire claws.
June was also the month of Israel escalating the nuclear threat with Iran, not long after May had raised similar fears between India and Pakistan. The news is still filled with munitions exploding over and into Gaza and various cities in Ukraine.
This torn and restless sky was filled with joy and anxious horror.
Always, always, art explodes within us when our souls are found wanting. Both our practices are calls to tell stories, to communicate, to reach out to other folk and invite them in. I have always called comics my first and best language and this they remain. So much more eloquent than my thick and stumbling tongue.
It has been a wonderful experience to have Chris teach me some of her own language. My hands manipulating clay, worbla and cruder sculpting techniques. Puppeteers see life in all things and it’s a very beautiful way to live in the world.
This comic has also been a celebration of all the animals who have graced us with their presence during our stay here. The estate is alive with hare, an animal I usually associate with the wheat fields pushing against the East Lothian coast. They are witches.
I haven’t seen a hedgehog in the wild seen since I was 7 years old when they lived under the shed in one of our many short lived homes. Chris and I followed this nonchalant wanderer until they snuffled off into the long grasses.
The red deer, the dancing stoat, a lizard under great shed scales of bark and the tiny frogs that fought their way over the paths and out of the cattle grid traps, drawn to new waters. These were our solstice touchstones.
June, terrifying, exquisite, busy and adventurous. Thank you for everything.
July, what are you bringing?
Who can say, who can say.
Stay angry. Stay radical.
Goblin Out.