About Me
My creative life, like many, began in the art room at school and then as a studio assistant to a master painter. In hindsight, these were the places I was happiest. In 2020 I returned to where I began, to my art practice.
More than half and the most ‘contented’ of those intervening years were spent designing galleries and exhibitions. A spatial-design practice more akin to a making a movie-in space; artefacts, stories, images, film and sound often in atmospheric found spaces.
Working for Shraga Weill on a painted ceiling for the Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts, Washington DC, 1971
All the years of designing have provided ballast to this ‘second-life’, working with found materials often in found spaces. It brings these two biographical strands together.
In our epoch, islands of plastic the size of France are floating across the oceans. I work with some of these forever materials. The earlier works were made from mylar coffee packets, the recent ones from emergency blankets, a ubiquitous bi-product of NASA. The coating is primed with gesso, then painted and abrased. It is transformed into a material with a presence of a past with hints of gilding.
Sometimes when I’m working this micro-thin plasticised gold or silver-coated aluminium material it feels like folding the tablecloth for the Last Supper. And this is the heart of it.
My pieces are abstract, not as a means of revealing a reductive truth, but as triggers to each viewer’s own associations.