I have always filled notebooks, carrying a small moleskin with me to scratch a quick sketch, or to capture a lovely flow of words. They are invaluable as a prompt; because of their immediacy, the time of writing/drawing comes flooding back.

I had begun working with our group Five on a Day Out (5OADO) for the Austerity/Binge exhibition at Talbot Gallery, June 2012, taking Hundertwasser's 1958 Mould Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture as comparison to our current crisis of the ghost estate in Ireland.

My work centres on experience, calling attention to a continuous negotiation between how things are and how things might be perceived - so, I began by attempting to build my own estate as a pop-up book, using my experimental Moleskin. The unroofed pop-ups mimicked the half-finished ruins I had witnessed.

Throughout the notebook, mirror imagery recurs in different forms; I am obsessed with the duality of most things and return

to mirroring and symmetry to illustrate the juncture in experience between what we see and what we feel. Subject matter

safely flips from The Hadron Collider to a house merry- go-round, because all is valid in the inner thoughts of the notebook. The hinged pages serve as a mini-gallery, where I trialled a mirrored message reflected opposite, later to be hung on a deAppendix wall.

Many pages were gessoed to accept fine polychromo pencils and watercolour paper inserted where necessary. Pop-up houses progressed to elaborate 3-house estates as I became more proficient; the residential section of a newspaper and a room service menu from a family wedding served me well. Work has progressed from a single reference point into the substantial body of work, Arrested Development, culminating in a giant billboard in Belfast 2013, due in no small part to this humble KRF:2 notebook.