I have a positive update about my Auntie — my mum’s sister. Not long ago, she was in a really bad way after a serious fall, and both Mum and I truly thought we were going to lose her. She’s been at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, and today we got some good news: she’s been moved to the rehabilitation ward, which is such an encouraging sign. Below, you can see the flowers Mum and I sent her today from Tynte Flowers.
I had no idea who it was — he didn’t identify himself. I sent him a message asking who he was, but he didn’t respond, so I thought, stuff it, and called him back.
When he answered, he said he didn’t want to tell me his name for his privacy, but he explained that he was an NDIS provider and that he was running from the government. Straight away, I knew exactly who it was: Dr Lewis Clements, the schizophrenic man who contacted me earlier this year and scared the shit out of me. Back then, I was convinced he was going to show up at our house and kill Mum and me in a frenzy.
He started asking me questions — how we knew each other, details about myself — all while using my name, yet he seemed to have no real idea who I actually was. Then he said he had me listed under his “Adelaide contacts.” That annoyed me. I wanted to tell him I was not his “contact” — I was someone who used his services years ago, and it was unbelievably inappropriate for him to reach out to me like this. But I didn’t want to stir him up more than he already was.
He said he needed somewhere to stay, and I told him he couldn’t stay with me because I had to think about my family. I suggested he look at some of the homelessness services available. He said they would refuse him because he had evidence of corruption against the government. As annoyed as I was that he’d contacted me again, I still really felt for him. I told him I’d look up some places overnight and get back to him tomorrow.
My intention was to find details for a few shelters where he might be able to stay, but before I could, he sent me another message saying he couldn’t wait until tomorrow and that people were outside his car calling him a faggot, a rapist, and a pedophile. I sent him the number for Mental Health Triage and told him that, while I knew it wasn’t necessarily a mental health crisis, they would be able to get him somewhere safe for the night.
He told me he couldn’t go anywhere because of his service dog, but I’m sure they could find someone to look after the dog while he was in safe accommodation. Since then, he’s sent me more messages about the evidence he claims to have against the government, but I’ve decided I’m not going to engage.
I could easily get pulled into this rabbit hole with him, wanting to help, but he isn’t like the beautiful homeless man I gave $100 to earlier in the week. Dr Clements feels unpredictable, maybe even predatory, and I can’t ignore the fact that people are calling him a rapist and a pedophile. What if there’s something in that? Still, in saying that, even monsters like that still deserve a warm bed for the night.
Aside from the very real temptation to help him, I cannot express how angry it makes me that he contacted me at all. We spoke once, for about an hour, during what I believed was a professional conversation — and for him to keep my mobile number and reach out so long afterwards feels like a violation of my privacy. It’s intrusive, and I don’t like the way it makes me feel.
That said, I’m also glad I spoke to him, because it reassured me that he doesn’t actually know anything about me apart from my number and my first name.
Yesterday, I received the two bound books I ordered — one for the Chief Justice of South Australia and one for the Speaker of the House of Assembly. For the Chief Justice, I had oaths from Supreme Courts around the world bound together, and for the Speaker, I collected the oaths used in parliaments across the globe.
I’ve spoken about this project before on this blog, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to capture just how significant, important, and personal the Supreme Court Oaths project is to me. I started collecting the oaths back in 2012, when I wrote to a handful of Chief Justices, and then in 2024 I wrote to every single Supreme Court in the world.
If I tried to put a price on this work, I couldn’t. You can’t put a value on the hours spent sourcing names and addresses for Chief Justices and Supreme Courts across the globe. You can’t put a price on what it has meant to me — a disgraced former court officer searching for meaning in the very oaths I once administered myself, oaths that carried no weight at the time because I was never sworn in by my own Chief Justice.
The oaths became more than words to me. I associate them with the idea of Lady Justice being blind, with love being blind, and with the promises made in courtrooms around the world every day. They hold a weight and a beauty that can’t be measured, and I would never want to try. That’s why I made the decision to gift this book to the Chief Justice of South Australia.
For me, he represents something different. He defies my understanding of what it means to be a judge. He doesn’t carry the elitist attitude that so many of them seem to have, yet he’s grounded in the universal principles of law and justice. The oaths themselves are something I treasure deeply. Someone once asked me what I would take from the house if it was burning down, and I said I’d take the oaths.
They represent my own exploration of oaths, love, and justice, and they became my first challenge as an artist — to create a pristine, museum-quality book that I could present to the Chief Justice. I don’t want to engage with him or seek any kind of interaction, because that would make me feel weird. But it would have meant so much to me to know that he might have liked the book, and maybe even seen it as a meaningful piece of conceptual artwork.
However, yesterday my heart literally broke into a million pieces when I received both the book for the Chief Justice and the Speaker back from the bookbinder. They look amateur, flawed, and lacking the signature of satisfactory craftsmanship I had hoped for. I am so disappointed. It’s no exaggeration to say I can physically feel the pain of losing the idea that my oaths would be finished to a standard where I could present them to the Chief Justice with any sort of integrity or pride.
You can see below both books and the embossing of the words on the front cover for the Speaker of the House of Assembly and the Chief Justice. I’ve taken an extra photo to show that some of the letters didn’t even print properly. I honestly don’t know how the bookbinders could have done this job and held their head high.
I spent over $1200 on both books, with the Chief Justice’s costing the most, and I would have happily paid double that for quality grade, top-notch craftsmanship. Instead, I’ve been short-changed. I even thought about leaving a negative Google review, but that’s not who I am, and it’s not who I want to be. I don’t want to leave that kind of negativity floating around in the universe. But at the same time, these bookbinders have really messed up the most important creative project I have ever undertaken.
My other thought was to take the book to a book restorer and have it redone, but I set myself the goal of sending the oaths this year, and the bookbinding industry in Australia moves slowly. So, I’m still going to send it to him. I shouldn’t — in many ways, it’s so bad that it feels like it shows no regard for him personally. But I still think he might find something meaningful in the oaths themselves, so I’ll send it anyway and leave out my contact details so he can’t reach me to tell me about the low bar I’ve set for anyone who wants to bind letters and send them to him in the future.
And the thing is — he would know a thing or two about bound books. He would have shelves of those stunning law volumes, beautifully lettered, with flawless craftsmanship. And here I am, sending him these ruined oaths.
The book for the Speaker isn’t as bad. It’s still deeply imperfect, but I suppose because it doesn’t matter as much to me, I’m not as upset about it. This whole experience, though, has taught me something about myself — about my own desire to master the art of neon glass bending and glass blowing. I want to develop a solid, high-quality skill set in both art forms, which are so closely connected. I want to create works that I can be proud of — proud to exhibit, proud to share, and proud to put my name on.
I’ve also learned that by trusting my oaths with a completely random and unknown bookbinder, I made myself vulnerable to imperfection — and in many ways, that’s my own fault. I should have sent a test or tried harder to find someone else, but I didn’t, and now I’m left without the result I was hoping for. I need to take responsibility for that, cut my losses, and send the book.
These bookbinders, though, should be ashamed of themselves. After delivering work like this, they somehow had the audacity to stick their sticker inside the front cover. To me, it doesn’t feel like a signature of craftsmanship — it feels like they’ve left a mark of shame.
