Statement
Being taken around the Museum of Modern Art in New York
as a teenager was a profound experience for me, it was the large scale
Abstract Exressionist paintings which particularly excited me, Robert
Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in particular. It was the
fact that the substance of paint itself had been placed centre stage as
part of the picture content, creating strange, beautiful and at times
disturbing imagined landscapes that I felt I could walk into and enter.
They were like nothing I had seen in the physical world around me yet
they were not fake, they felt like places I had visited before, though
not in everyday life, in an imagined more primal place. My first large
scale paintings were partly a homage to these artists whilst they also
explored particular themes such as the dichotomy between two polarised
‘worlds’: The complexity of the interior psychological life
of the individual in contrast to the swaggering of the exterior, sometimes
brutal, ‘real’ world. The aim was to use paint to create an
interesting and engaging visual language that would throw into relief
the tension that exists between these two very different spaces.
The paintings in ‘Nervous Energy’ appear very different in
form, they are pared down and simplified. The choice of acrylic instead
of oil is important to obtain a plastic-like matt surface, its ability
to dry more quickly allows the crucial layering and masking processes
to proceed more efficiently. I had been looking at Mary Heilmann’s
work which has a bright immediacy to it, coming from the lineage of minimalism
she pushes her work into another, more obviously playful, arena. I wanted
to have the audacity to attempt a certain lightness of touch that she
achieves whilst following through my own fascination with paint and the
painting process. These minimalist points of inspiration (Peter Halley
and Agnes Martin for example) are definitely evident, though my work is
busier and more agitated describing a kind of Abstract Surrealism.
An enquiry into the nature of process is also part of the aim in ‘Nervous
Energy, looking at ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’:
A ‘commodity’ moves along a conduit into some processing ‘arena’
(for example an engine, a blender or an intestine) and is ejected, changed,
at the other end. This could be alluding to the alchemy of oil refineries
(a subject in other work of mine) or possibly the bodily: eating, digesting
and expelling. The ‘alchemy’ of the creative process is alluded
to: that the practice of painting itself suggests transformation. In doing
this I am attempting to create a bold, playful and engaging visual arena
which draws the viewer into a differently configured world.
My way of working is a painterly one even when making three-dimensional
and installation pieces. Borders and edges of things (boundaries) where
one thing ends and another begins is one of my ‘thought tracks’.
For instance in Blackboard – Experiment 1, I am investigating the
classic point of departure for learning: the blackboard in a classroom.
It is here where a certain, traditional learning process takes place:
thoughts, knowledge and facts, literally (in the form of text and diagrams
in white chalk), hit the hard blackboard surface and bounce off it, making
their departure, aimed at the student, who is meant to retain and hold
onto them, vessel-like. This installation was set up in an old nineteenth
century school which is now artists studios, hence my decision to have
the blackboards white – turning the blackboard ‘convention’
to its negative (artists studios and galleries are often painted white).
It also became a place where panels folded out, strip lights lit up mirrors
and model building-like structures were attached.
The sculptural pieces I make reflect forms, shapes and objects from my
two-dimensional work manifesting them three-dimensional. This is particularly
apparent when looking at the installations in Time and Place where brightly
coloured structures jut out at the viewer from the wall, some resembling
the conduits, pathways and objects in the paintings from ‘Nervous
Energy’ and ‘Piecing It Together’.
‘Piecing it Together’ refers, in part, to my practice as an
artist, which had to be slowly pieced back together after my PGCE was
completed in 2003. It also alludes to the collages I have ‘pieced
together’ which form the inspiration for the paintings in this show.
The collages are made up from bits of photographs of the urban landscape
around my studio, magazine cuttings, diagrams and charts from newspapers,
drawings, paintings and doodles. The aim was to create unusual, sometimes
beautiful, sometimes unsettling, images which also contain a hidden narrative:
a selected slice of a reconfigured journey through changing built environments.
I see the world around me as chaotic and inexplicable: it demands of us
strategies to deal with it. The works I make are my attempts at creating
strategies that deal with the mystery and dislocation I frequently experience
living in the world as I find it today. The aim is to create work that
allows the viewer different possible points of entry when looking at the
work, from here they can then move their gaze around the piece in question,
finding meanings and connections of their own.