‘Inverse eclipse (Ziggy)’ 2026. Vinyl and 1k Acrylic. 30cm diameter.
Allied to my interest in finding visual analogues for the sound I can no longer hear I became interested in my old and much forgotten vinyl collection. This was sparked by an overgrown No Entry sign on one of my preferred walking routes to the studio. It was both swamped and encased by a privet hedge and the paint had begun to run.. It looked like my world increasingly feels.
The circular format made me think of the LP’s that my children (now grown up) had gleefully thrown across the living room when I was in my CD phase.
I found I could carve and polish vinyl and also paint it. Circles have featured in my work for decades. My theory is that even though our eyesight has a peripheral edge far closer to an ellipse, the shape is fiendishly difficult to fabricate in reality. Thus the world of modern paint acquires a rectilinear format almost unknown in nature.
This is a David Bowie album, ..Ziggy Stardust.. very close to my heart. The paint hints at an inverse eclipse, as if he was falling into the sun.
My approach here leans consciously towards the car body shop and away from the easel.
‘Gilt’. 2024-6. Paper and paint. 22 x 15.5 x 3cm.
This book has been in the studio since 2014. It was a delight to find a philosophy book with such typographic bravura, normally tomes like this are very understated. It took years to think of the right approach. I imagined the gods sending a divine bullet, its course burning the pages gold and the wound leaving a small pool of sunlight.
‘Baffles in Beethoven’. 2026. Vinyl and Acrylic Wool. 30cm diameter.
Studio baffles are a common feature when recording or rehearsing as a group. They often feature a woven covered fabric that helps to absorb and isolate frequencies and volume. This album now has dampeners of its own.
‘Blood On The Tracks’. 2026. Vinyl. 30cm Diameter.
Polishing away the music. Sometimes something is so hard to photograph you have to settle for making an analogue. The tracks have been polished away by hand until the vinyl takes on the gloss of a mirror. The images make it look as if the mirror has been applied, something added on top. In fact it’s an exercise in removal. A process I‘ve explored many times in the past with images and text. I do this by hand with successive grades of wet and dry paper and then a cutting polish. When I could listen to music, this was my favourite Dylan album.
‘Cutting new tracks in Abbey Road’. 2026. Vinyl. 30cm Diameter.
After I went deaf I gradually lost the ability and desire to listen to music. It was a big change. Most people think my work is about books, understandable since I use so many, but that would be a mistake. I’m interested in information. I dug out my old and extremely neglected Vinyl archive. I discovered the material is quite amenable. It can be carved, sanded and polished. This piece is where one of my woodcarving gouges finds a new use. I can still access the music but in a different way.
‘Curtain’ 2019. Paper and Silicone Rubber. 81 x 67cm
Happy to have this piece, and some other things, on show in Paris with Patrick Heide at the Drawing Now fair. Opens Tomorrow.
Like Mark E Smith, I’ve always enjoyed repetition, this piece is like an abacus for an immense and perhaps demented calculation, or the eggs of an unusually precise Sturgeon.
‘Elect’ 2002. Paper and silicone rubber. 30 x 22.5 x 10cm
A piece from 24 years ago that will be in the group show ‘Library’ at the Lewisham Art House PV Thursday 26th March.
A book on JFK and a book on Palmistry. Hands in the air. I remember several documentaries on the assassination of JFK, with the grim details of brain loss. Extruded material seems to hold us with atavistic fascination, that which passes through or leaves the body, always a reminder of mortality.
Happy to be be showing three small sculptures in the old Deptford Library. It became the Art House in 1992. An original Carnegie library it was still open when I moved to New Cross in 1980/81 though I didn’t ever go in. I think I joined the Library in Lewisham, the one near the hospital.
‘Dandelion in Dress’. 2025. Paper. 30 x 20 x 5cm
Happy to have this and other work at TEFAF with Patrick Heide Gallery.
This is another piece exploring the what I think of as the antonym of the pressed flower. The flower erupts from the book rather than lying flattened within.
The book was a very short history of clothing, inscribed by the author inside as a gift to the Lord Chancellor. I don’t know whether it was invited or uninvited. A dandelion, often considered a weed and so ubiquitous it passes barely without notice, seemed inversely appropriate for a book which was partly celebrating the idea of the Dandy.
‘Limb, the Apostles and Rome’. 2026. Plaster, Paper, Screws, Paint. 24 x 19 x 21cm.
A different treatment for these pieces. I became interested in seeing them partly as vessels, with a closed back..
An enduring memory from my first childhood visits to the Roxy Cinema in Hollinwood were the Pearl and Dean advertisements. The words Pearl and Dean raced towards the viewer in single point perspective surrounded by building like graphics also streaming towards the audience. I’ve often made objects that exploited the idea of the architectural plan simply being extended upwards or outwards. Like an extrusion.
The three books in this piece were actually all novels with the words Apostles and Rome in the titles, not religious tracts at all. But the work is still a kind of trinity. The extruded aspect also made me think of severed boughs or limbs.
‘Kernel’. 2016. Paper and Silicone Rubber. 50 x 28 x 19cm.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a Victorian English politician and writer, very well known and popular in his day. I knew nothing of him when I found this book sometime around 2010. Wikipedia now brings him back from obscurity. I was struck by the title- ‘My Novel’. It seemed a bit like a child’s first bowel movement in the potty. Proud and faintly ironic. Perhaps an arch attempt to put a shield of irony front and centre on something that the writer knows to be suspect. I also thought it redolent of self publishing. It could also of course double as an allusion to something I might pompously want to publish.
I encased the book in a brain like jelly of clear silicone rubber. The kind of silicone you would want at the margins of your sink or bath. Keeping things in and keeping things out.
