feb 2024, installation statement

My work is predominantly an escape from painting into sculpture, I am fascinated by the materiality (for want of a better word) of found things, from which I mount up installations.

I am interested in the environment, and how we care for it, from domestic places to the ocean and the jungle, how people can have a beneficial impact on the world, rather than feeling horrible about how it's going. The world is both internal and external, and bridging this is colour, which I sometimes work with in painting and installation, unseparated, context is very important to me, and I make installations with paintings to go further in expressing how I feel. This is where I am at the moment.

lithography

I learned zinc plate lithography last term, these have become as well as pieces themselves but also elements in my installations. Layering colour, and working more intently with the quality of marks.

Control is a big question here, with installation there demands a control of the environment in question, in abstract art control is questionable too.

It is a lot about the eye, for me choices are made posthumously, and then as I gather experience they occur in the making, I become a fine artist, it's been in a below ground way, a lower route, 

jan 2022, rca artist’s statement

After a slow start, with some help from my friend (Graham Hudson), instalationing started to snowball, each week more was added, more was taken away. Decoration, colour, things that mean things…

Translucency, paleness, a certain drift, groundswell, possibility, taking the happennesics of painting into sculpture, I was unsure what I was here to do. I feel like I’m feeding and watering a rabbit, or even a guinea pig, and it sniffles out of its sleeping hole a little bit more each day. 

I have to pay close attention to what it likes to eat, sometimes it matters that there’s not much, sometimes it’s a free for all but it needs to be dragged back to be meaningful other than exuberant

In fact it is between this and fineness, or control, or beauty, about being inside something. 

It almost doesn’t matter what I do just that I do it properly, 

On the other hand, my work in all honesty with my whole heart, this year, started with a belief that art could respond to climate change, to make itself useful, and as soon as I introduced colour to the matrix it totally avoided this dream. This bothered me a bit, a lot!

What side of the divide do I stand, can art stand up or does it need to be recycled, to make useful people useful. In my politics it’s a no brainer, I suppose its all to talk about. 

I also have an appropriation problem with some of the objects ‘I sequestered’, I wish to learn from them. Some people call me earthy which I am growing to understand. I think they mean how Beuys is earthy. A materiality, this is how I draw. I wait for the matrices to pull together, I place questions on them, I ask them to reveal themselves. I have been called modernist. 

I can put up with a small amount of erasure or taring.

drawing

I have a postgraduate diploma in life drawing so it is a shame this practice is on the back burner, I mean to get really into it this new term. 

Unrelated, I also have a practice of abstract ink drawings in the school of Michaux like Appel too. They have transformed over a 6 month cycle, I'm not sure exactly when I started, half way through last spring. A few artist’s books, sketch books later they have drawn a presence between control and freedom, bordering on flatulence, bordering on travel, maybe instead of travel, in England, bordering on a tension of white paper and black line, that all is possible, so why this? 

They have had the same measurements, and different scales, also including some lithography.