If my work is about anything, I think it may be an attempt to express vague musings about the passage of time made corporeal through certain images surfaces and textures. According to the Maurice Denis dictum, 'before being a horse, a nude or some sort of anecdote, a work of art is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order'. So, first and foremost, I suppose my work is essentially about the material I use, assembled in a certain order, torn, stained, scratched or etched into.
We are surrounded by technological wizardry which the vast majority cannot understand: a digitalised, pixelated and electronic world on the surface of the catacombs of time: a past time with which it becomes increasingly difficult to engage as we become more and more embroiled with technological overload. I would be quite happy to see my work as a place of retreat as it is a deliberate remove from a digitally manipulated, glossy advertising culture with an emphasis on instant gratification. I use card that has often been used as packaging for this consumerist society and then discarded. I am not interested in impact as such, but work that reveals itself over time.
I like the idea of working with slate because of the age and nature of the material. Slate is of sedimentary origin, formed from the deposits of minerals collected on the beds of ancient seas millions of years ago. Movement of the Earth's crust, retreating seas or whatever, pushed these ancient sea beds to the surface where they were eventually quarried by man to provide shelter from the winds and the rain. The slate I use has all served this purpose and is eroded and marked by this exposure to the elements as well as by man made pollutants in the atmosphere. I am interested in the journey from the seabed to the the quarry, from the quarry to the rooftop, and from the rooftop to the artwork.
I take the slate after it has been discarded , wash away remaining grime and scratch into it or leave traces of some description, a hand print or footprint perhaps, and then assemble the various pieces. The circles could be seen as moons, suns, planetary orbits [strictly speaking elliptical] or the curve of space time. Or maybe they're just circles. The hand prints reference those palaeolithic prints found in the dark recesses of caves alongside man's first attempts at pictorial representation of his world 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. The footprints reference the tracks made by two individuals on a soft bed of clay which were shortly afterwards filled in by fine volcanic ash and lay undisturbed until they were unearthed 3.5 million years later by Mary Leakey in Tanzania. It is not impossible that those hands and those feet could have contained a blueprint for you and me.
When I say I only think the work may have something to do with the comprehension of time, however, it is because one can never be fully explicit about any work of art. There is always something at one remove, something which cannot be quite pinned down. All the constructs built to describe a thought or feeling are, of necessity, parts of the map and not the territory.
Writing about Richard Diebenkorn's 'Ocean Park' series of paintings, Robert Hughes wrote that one heard "neither the chant of surging millions, nor even the chorus of a movement, but one measured voice, quietly and tersely explaining why this light, this colour, this intrusion of a 30 degree angle into a glazed and modulated field might be valuable in the life of the mind and of feeling".
I am interested in the life of the mind and of feeling, but, nevertheless, people confronting the work will make of it what they will.
