Current Work
Now What. My seven year preoccupation with Hackney Downs wound down gradually. My book Being In The Studio With Hackney Downs provided an ending of sorts. However the cumbersome presence of the Hackney Downs objects in my studio and the time-consuming failure to find a place for a culminating ‘all of it’ exhibition held me up. The destruction or reuse of some things and the storing of others helped me. Thoughts about a large public installation were eventually condensed into the two archive suitcases – Drawings Archive and Reliquary. Only after the matter of Hackney Downs was satisfactorily out of the way in the suitcases could I begin to move on. The ways of working begun during the Hackney Downs years continue to develop.
My recent work is in many respects another chapter to the Hackney Downs work – it certainly couldn’t exist without it.
There are two main differences.
1 During the Hackney Downs years everything I made related to the memory drawings recording my cycle journeys across the Downs. You could almost say it was all one work. The works since do not have that shared process. Various ideas present themselves. That said, a great many of them relate to Shetland. Not so long ago I would have claimed somewhat implausibly that this was a coincidence. I am now forced to admit that a strong feeling for place – in one way or another – is common to much of my work.
2 The Hackney Downs work came out of a crisis, “The work that followed…defined itself by my feeling prohibited from painting in the way I was used to”
Those battles are over. The way I work now is simply what has become available to me. I don’t have to argue with myself about it, it’s not in opposition to anything and occasionally I even manage to paint – in certain limited circumstances.