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.