MY RATIONALE

The pieces displayed on this site represent work made from 2001 until the present day. From late 2005 I have been working full time as an artist.

With regard to so-called gallery work - I respond to submission requests from friends and to open submission invitations.My own projects tend to be based around a series of linked tasks or simply a list. I collect the images bit by bit and the piece grows. While executing/collecting I come to understand better what the piece may be about. That's not to say that I don't think about the piece first, but sometimes other layers to the piece become apparent.The principle tactic is a reflection of a male impulse to complete collections of thematically linked objects. This can, in extremis, be linked to Asperger's Syndrome (which I don't have). Asperger's is a kind of autism. Men are more diposed to collect things (records, train numbers, football programmes), and my collections reflect and celebrate something of that bloody-mindedness. I know that my understanding of this is minute and am happy to be corrected.

For me, I realised that one of the few long term projects I had seen through in my life was the acquisition of all 1001 singles (though not on 7" vinyl) in Dave Marsh's book "The Heart Of Rock and Soul". Granted this is not a creative pursuit, but it took the best part of 20 years and felt good when it was finished. I decided to apply this thoroughness to what had been an ad hoc way of producing art. As soon as I did this, it began to fall into place.If you were looking for a theme that runs through my work - or God forbid, subject matter - then you could push me to admit that a lot of it is born from my love of maps. Not necessarily as physical objects that help us stay found, but as mental frameworks that contextualise what we do and where we are. As someone who has, at the time of writing (May 2007)) lived at 22 different addresses in 41 years, it has always been important for me to know where I lay my hat, as it were.

At the time my art practice revived properly (early 2003), I saw a Walker Evans show at the Photographers Gallery in London. It was of some of his later work - polaroids which he took as and when something turned his head. Eventually, he said, you end up with your camera and your taste. This was quite a liberating thing for me to hear and some of the work herein is obviously my attempt to capture that spirit for myself. Granted, some of this looks like data collection and may end up being used in a very different form, but the raw data has a charm, I think, and I hope you enjoy looking at it.

Late in 2008 I enrolled on an MA in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. The work produced up until that date and the motivations for it (i.e. those outlined above), have provided me with a base from which to work, but the nature of post-graduate studt is to question and peel away to get at what really drives the practitioner. In short, watch this space.

On a more commercial note, I am happy to produce physical versions of this work for sale and would be delighted to discuss how this might happen. I'm not particularly wedded to a format or price structure.