Introduction by the artist A lot of my early films were really an excuse to put my drawings or my paintings onto celluloid, the supreme example being A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978), a filmed exhibition of my paintings conceived and organised to explain a narrative - the paintings came first, the film second. The maps are necessarily very varied, sometimes easy and obvious to follow, sometimes not cartographical at all in the orthodox sense, but composed of a series of symbolic instructions or written text. A large post - with a scarcely concealed purpose - stands in a landscape of decipherable clues. Carlo Ginzburg's historical investigation, The Cheese and the Worms, is a starting-place for a speculation on heresy and the punishments for committing it. At the end of the sixteenth century, a miller believed that the world was a lump of rancid cheese inhabited by worms. He was burnt with his books at the stake. The miller's stake brings to mind other stakes and other posts of punishment and correction, and is surrounded with a scarcely ambiguous testament of humiliation - stripping, beating, shaving and incontinence. Between 1978-80 I made a film called The Falls. It was a watershed for me, a catalogue-movie narrating ninety-two biographies of people who had suffered the effects of a scarcely comprehended phenomenon called the Violent Unknown Event. The film is also an ironic examination of all the ways the world could end, and it is not entirely irrelevant that ninety-two is the atomic number of uranium. To arrange and codify the extensive information about these ninety-two unfortunates, all manner of bureaucratic devices were used, not least the grid, which, in appropriate self-reflexive terms, was the film animator's grid. On this graphic account of field sizes I collaged much pertinent information about flight and flying-aspirations, airman and aviators, pilots and navigators, birds and birdmen. A sequence display to aid a project not yet completed. Fifty-five frames arranged in five rows of eleven emphasising the troughs and heights of a three-year courtship between an alcoholic hedonist and an unhappy horsewoman - all measured in ironic horse stories. It is a clarification of a writing structure through pictorial representation. As well as the marking of emotional gradients, there are anecdotal reminders of blue skies, dark interiors, pursuits, a white bridge, violence and secondary seductions. Inevitably the paint splashes and dribbles themselves become events which are just as important as what is intentionally, intellectually devised. In my film Prospero's Books, John Gielgud, playing Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest, colonises his island with creatures. Shakespeare does not elaborate about this island population. I did. Some of his island subjects are native, some are immigrants, some are magic-ed out of thin air. Using them all as raw material, Prospero invents, discovers, and creates a court that masquerades as a theatre of the world. Such was my unfinished fascination for these creatures in the film that I expanded on them - and began to write a fuller account of their purposes. Perhaps this new text may become a novel. Or a film. The images of words and pictures here are manufactured from the rejected pages of the first drafts of this new text. Two works from my 1999 series 'Blackboard Paintings'. 'Georges' is Georges Perec and the 'Ease' - the Es - refers to the novel he wrote without using the letter E in remembrance of his Jewish grandparents whose first names were initialised with the letter E. They went missing in Germany in the 1940s. The world is black with cinders, though the offering of copious E initials is a putative recompense for the grieving Perec. Under the cinderous murk is maybe the outline-fence and the black winter mud of Belsen, bordered by the scrubbed disinfected wood planking of the wooden death shacks. One of the tombstones made ready for our imaginations on the floor of the Old Church in Amsterdam is the tombstone of Saskia van Rijn, Rembrandt's second wife. Perhaps it is apocryphal. The lettering is uncharacteristic of the church and certainly from a later date than the late 1600s. It is probably nineteenth century, perhaps placed there at the request or bequest of a sentimental non-Dutchman. Nonetheless, when we were filming The Baby of Macon in this handsome church, this tombstone was a needle and a pointing, an in memoriam and a resting place, a focus and a melancholy reminder that the inspiration for three of the most erotic nudes in Western art was a skeleton two metres down in the water-filled sand. Because the tombstone is probably apocryphal, and because her memory pervades the whole church, Saskia's name has been fragmented and scattered across the whole tomb floor.