The seeds of my work are produced by serially mining my personal disquiet. The work is always personal and sometimes provocative. I do not consider any area of my history to be safe from molestation.
Much of the work utilises sentimental mementoes exhibited as sacred objects. “Reliquary”, a collection of 25 relics, is the prime example. Other totems have been incorporated into works like “Heart Ache’, “Come Shake My Hand”, ‘Play Time”, “Enclosures/Disclosures” and “Vespertinus Sordidus”. Such historical personal effects are obviously limited, although I continue to keep souvenirs for future use, the majority of the work has to exist without such fetish objects.
I recreate events from my past by making scale models of building and interiors, sometimes peopled sometimes not, that aim to venerate the mundane and bring a level of sacredness to private fleeting moments. This is something I attempt in all my work; whether it be an empty park hut with a discarded pair of briefs on the ground (“Erosion”) or a model of a school in a box only visible through several viewing holes that show the same couple in windows or in the grounds (‘Act of Devotion”).
“Library” is a collection of books housed behind glass, so cannot be read, and therefore more of a mausoleum. The dust-jackets of these books record, in series, the names, of my romantic encounters, as the authors of titles that define the relationships.
Other work that has less of a deep personal origin, will have some level of historic personal reference. The recreation of the front of a, now demolished, local mental asylum (“Bear Ye One Another’s Burdens”) where a single red figure among several white figures looking out of the windows, the door open; delivers a foreboding message.
Two dimensional work, including figurative painting, also attempts to venerate my past, and the subject matter of many are old photographs, invariably of poor quality, which are re-presented in oil paint as a method of elevating the subject matter, away from the original medium, and imbuing the event with the significance it holds in my consciousness.
I work from a small studio in the town centre of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
