I've been followed around by foxes for a long time. I vividly remember an early childhood dream in which I was a cartoon chicken driving a red car, pursued by a cartoon fox. When I moved to London my bedroom window opened into a small graveyard and I would sit on my window-ledge at dusk watching the urban foxes slink past to visit our bins. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on fox trapping in London where a large population of urban foxes are classified as pests. When I moved to San Diego California I missed the foxes. I made friends with a medical hypnotist called Dr Edwin Yager and we conspired to create a series of hypnotic inductions that would enable me to feel more like a fox. We experimented with this in Dr Yager's office. My most salient memory of being a fox in Dr Yager's office was how strong and unpleasant his ankles smelled, and how exciting it was to be able to smell the difference between his chair, table and bookshelves which were made of different species of wood.
At the same time my close friend Mathew Whittington began working on a book-project in collaboration with artist Paul Elliman in response to the short-lived 1970s art journal "The Fox". The resulting publication The Fox #4 explores and appropriates the fox as a shadowy figure of disruption that emerges through cracks within the domesticated languages of design and urban planning. It includes contributions by Hannah Arendt, Esther Leslie & Ben Watson, Mike Davis, Roland Barthes, Frederico Campagna, P.J. Stahl, Bill Hutchinson, Charles Nodier, Franz Kafka, Mabli Elliman, Kirsten Gallerneaux Brooks and myself. The Fox #4 is available to purchase here: www.mottodistribution.com