A half of a brick is still a brick. Half a brick is a block. A building block, it is a thing of construction. Repeated, it makes a wall. Unnoticed, it is a stumbling block. It is mobile. When lobbed, it brings the construction down. This research draws on legacies of minimalism, as exemplified in processes of isolation and the repetition of a singular unit – but it is not reductive. Literal theatricality is embraced and ramped up in the drafting of stage directions, and lighting and effects plots embedded as a part of picture making. As with theatrical scripts, a looped feedback of proposition and account is employed and items are expelled and accumulate around the questions: ‘What is the record?’ ‘What is the thing?’ Within this recursive process motifs appear. Each form, whether it be half a brick, a choral ode, a riddle, a monogram or a rolled butterfly collar, expands on the materiality and mechanisms of the thing itself. The approach is to creep up on it: a form of research by stealth.