94 satin-finished pages filled with sketches, tattoo flash, artwork, and introspective musings. Encased in a striking black cover with gold foil detailing, Isolation is a visual and emotional time capsule created during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020. Each page offers a glimpse into solitude, resilience, and artistic exploration.
Perfect for collectors, tattoo enthusiasts, and those drawn to the beauty of introspection and design.
In March 2020, I left Melbourne for a quick birthday trip home to Mildura — just a week to reset. Then, as we watched the news unfold, it became clear the world was changing. Flights were grounded. Borders closed. I was already home, and I made the call to stay.
Tattooing was shut down indefinitely. My income vanished overnight. But I wasn’t willing to let my creative momentum do the same. To keep myself busy — and to stay sharp for whenever the world reopened — I set a daily rule: draw one complete tattoo flash sheet, every single day.
At first, it was purely technical discipline. But as the days passed, something shifted. I started pulling out my earlier fine art pieces — large-scale paintings, Copic illustrations, pencil studies — and writing about them. Not polished essays. Just small, honest observations: where they came from, what I felt, how they’d been made. The more I wrote, the more I realised how much of my process had gone undocumented.
Within three months, I had enough to form a book. Ninety-four pages, bound in a gold foil cover. Part visual journal, part portfolio, part self-examination. I called it Isolation.
Publishing it wasn’t just an act of expression — it was survival. With tattoo work gone, the book became a way to support myself financially through a period of deep uncertainty. It also became the first time I saw my work collected, sequenced, and printed as a whole. In that form, I could see the patterns — the symbols, the obsessions, the design language that would eventually evolve into steel.
Isolation was more than a lockdown project. It was a mirror. It reflected back the artist I already was, and hinted at the one I was becoming.
