A Year in Motion: Inside Pushing the Wave 2024

Each year, Pushing the Wave begins the same way: with a return. Not to a place, exactly, but to a trail of thoughts, images and moments—some half-formed, some sharply remembered—that together trace the shape of a year. What emerges is not a record so much as a reckoning: with what was seen, what was felt, and what, for whatever reason, refused to let go.

Each year, when I come to assemble Pushing the Wave, I find myself caught between anticipation and unease. There is the quiet pleasure of rediscovery—of returning to thoughts once pursued, places once walked, images once captured—and there is also the recognition that what lies before me is not simply a collection of work, but something more personal.

As I wrote in the preface:

“The excitement lies in rediscovering ideas I’d explored and images I’d captured: fragments of a life lived in thought, observation and motion. The apprehension stems from the same source: these are, after all, pieces of myself offered to the world.”

That tension runs through Pushing the Wave 2024. It is a book shaped not by a single idea, but by movement—across landscapes, across subjects, and perhaps most of all, across ways of seeing.

Some of the pieces in this year’s collection return to questions that have long preoccupied me: what we value, what we pursue, and what we leave behind.

In It’s not the awards that matter, I found myself circling around the strange theatre of recognition—those moments when art is weighed, ranked, and celebrated:

“It’s not the awards themselves that interest me so much, as I find the idea of ranking artistic endeavour and the giving out of statuettes faintly ludicrous…”

The piece begins in cinema, but it is not really about film. It is about the human need to measure, to compare, to declare something the best—and the uneasy feeling that, in doing so, we may be missing the point entirely.

That question echoes elsewhere in the book—in writing about education, about culture, about the ways in which we construct meaning in a world that resists simple answers.

In 2024, I allowed myself to be more direct. Some subjects are approached head-on; others emerge more quietly, revealing themselves only in retrospect.

As I note in the preface:

“I tried to push a little further… allowing space for contradiction, vulnerability and even doubt.”

This is perhaps most evident in pieces such as The dark underbelly of AI and This is how we get heard, where the tone sharpens, and the stakes feel more immediate. But even here, the aim is not to prescribe or conclude, but to examine—to hold competing ideas in tension and see what remains.

Alongside these essays runs another current: travel, and the way place shapes perception.

The journey along the north coast of Northern Ireland was, in many ways, a return—but also a reorientation. What struck me most was not simply the beauty of the landscape, but the shift in perspective it demanded:

“Here, away from the tumult and the endless clattering of urban life, it was nature that ruled.”

Standing at Carrick-a-Rede, looking out across the Atlantic, there was a sense not just of distance, but of scale—of being placed, briefly, within something larger and less yielding than the frameworks we construct around ourselves.

That same sense of distance, though of a different kind, runs through the photographs and reflections from Cuba. It is a place that resists easy interpretation, leaving behind impressions that are vivid but not always coherent:

“While Cuba left so many strong impressions, some good, some bad… the reality is that, geographically speaking, we barely scratched the surface.”

And perhaps that is the point. Not every journey resolves itself. Some remain open, suspended between memory and uncertainty.

Interwoven throughout the book are photographs and drawings—attempts to capture something that language alone cannot quite hold.

I have always resisted calling myself a visual artist, but the act itself has become increasingly important:

“I find the act of capturing a line, a shadow, or a detail through the lens or on the page helps anchor the text, and sometimes say what words cannot.”

A line drawing made in Umbria, simple and almost incidental, became one such moment—an attempt not to record a place, but to understand how it was being seen.

There is a self-portrait in the collection, drawn almost absent-mindedly while waiting in a bar—an image that surprised me in what it revealed:

“I was intrigued, and saddened, by the results, but somehow not surprised.”

Like much of the work in this book, it was not planned. It emerged.

If there is a thread that binds Pushing the Wave 2024, it is not a single argument or narrative, but a set of questions carried forward from piece to piece.

They are the same questions that have guided the project from the beginning:

“What matters? What endures? What do we carry forward?”

I do not pretend to answer them here. What I hope instead is that, somewhere in these pages—in the essays, the journeys, the images—you might find a moment that resonates. A thought that lingers. A perspective that shifts, even slightly.

Because that, in the end, is all Pushing the Wave has ever tried to do.

📚 Explore and buy Pushing the Wave 2024 here↗︎