I have been enjoying a new found freedom to paint and make work the past 6 months. Cutting back on lecturing duties where the nature of institutional pressure seems at odds with the space needed to actually make work, ironic as Art Colleges should be bastions of creativity and nurture not just students but teachers and academics. This search for a balance between making art and earning money is as complex as ever but the one thing I have come to realise is change as a positive element in life. Change precipitated thru circumstance, travel, chance, new acquaintances and new ideas. This keeps the creative ball rolling, this allows work to develop thru the considered re imagining of core artistic beliefs mediated thru an ultra critical mindset. Crucial elements remain as powerful as ever, materiality, surface, partnership with mediums and allowing materials to find their form. This process is in a state of constant flux between my own inferred and angled research and the dictates of coherent artistic production. Making work and thinking deeply about its significance, its connectivity to the world and its intra referential positioning allows the manifestation of objects that have their own unique autonomy but are also inherently linked to the nature of the maker. This means that the work is imbued with experience and rigour, the rigour born from the daily manipulations of mediums and the experience from the questioning mind.
The latest series of paintings are actually very sculptural in nature, whilst predominantly two dimensional they exist as objects in their own right with no allusion to representational space or object/form. Personalised symbolic distillations often appear and these are often consolidated and encouraged to find connections and balance with other marks. These objects express a thematic concentration, almost a compression of visual, material and conceptual concerns into a statement that offers both contemporary relevance and historical reference.
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