At the age of seventeen, Mike Ladd began reading his poetry at Adelaide's renowned Friendly Street and his poems started appearing in local and national publications. His first book The Crack in the Crib was published in 1984 followed by eight collections of poetry and prose. Mike was the editor of ABC Radio National's highly respected Poetica, which ran for eighteen years. He currently works for Radio National's features and documentary unit, and he and his partner Cathy Brooks have been running projects that put poems on street signs as public art. Mike is a poetry mentor, judge, and also a reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald. Over the past two decades he has given poetry workshops and masterclasses in every state and territory of Australia. Mike Ladd lives in Adelaide.
Cathy Brooks is a South Australian artist working across the fields of graphics, painting, photography and mixed media installation. She is actively involved in community and urban arts projects often using recycled materials and collaborative processes.
She graduated from the South Australian School of Art in 1980 with a BA in photography and sculpture and completed a Master of Visual Art and Design in painting in 2007 at UniSA.
Since the 1980s Cathy has had multiple solo and group exhibitions. Her work is held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Mortlock Library and in private collections.
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'Twenty-four dreams, each of them a portal into a garden of forking paths and thence into the crazy cornucopia of the Internet. Mike Ladd's dream world, obliquely reflected in images by Cathy Brooks, turns out to be a good deal more interesting than the real world: funny, wondrous, and full of erotic promise.' - JM Coetzee
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'I was spellbound by this hallucinatory excursion through the uncharted, elusive terrain between unconscious states and wide-awake reality. Inspired by “dream logic”, in which he is given a set of mysterious yet clear instructions in his vivid dreams, Mike Ladd embarks on a quest to find meaning for the words he hears as he sleeps, taking ideas for a walk via internet search engines and the happenings of daily life. It's weird and wonderful, rich with literary, philosophical and political understanding and powerfully allusive, matched brilliantly by the artwork of Cathy Brooks. Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Perec come to mind, along with Dora Maar.' - Robyn Ravlich
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'Has Mike Ladd invented a new genre? Odd, catchy phrases coughed up by the poet's dream unconscious riff playfully with the collective unconscious that is the World Wide Id of the Internet. The resulting meditations - funny, poignant, allusive and, yes, dreamy, are further refracted through the prisms of Cathy Brooks' playfully dreamy artworks.' - Peter Goldsworthy