2020-

Lockdown broke the trail of Shetland related ideas begun in 2013. At first I just treated lockdown as a chance to work without distractions. I finished Valley and pinned up drawings expecting to continue with related Shetland ideas.

Instead I was surprised to find myself making a topical work. Footfall began as a record of my walkings during the first lockdown. A stitched version was abandoned and replaced by a concertina’d structure of paper and cloth with the walked routes marked on old large scale A - Z pages. Other matters adhered and it became ‘a self-centred History and Geography’ of all things pandemical.

The unfolding structure of Footfall maybe connects to the linked together wire coat-hangers which began the making of Search Me. They felt a bit skeletal and I added a bit of body in the form of a piece of canvas marked by previous workings. Various things were incorporated. Detached elements spread onto the floor. Somewhere along the way it began to feel like the sheer awkwardness of my materials – the stiffness of wire – the difficulty of ungluing – was getting in the way. The freedom of being able to use any old stuff as material (a freedom I’d been relishing since the first three dimensional works made in 2007) had become a hindrance. Search Me includes an amount of mark making / painting.

P(ainting) S(hirt) is a painting. It came ‘out of the blue’. Following the crisis in my painting in 2006 almost all of my work has been made of materials other than paint. Such paintings as did get made were small and quickly done – they had the character of exceptions – sort of hit and run paintings. PS felt different, it is the first painting I’ve made for fifteen years in which I felt I had full permission to wander about in it for as long as I liked. The internal censor had taken a holiday.

Emboldened by this I took up the discarded canvas I’d abandoned in 2006, I’d kept it almost as a warning reminder of why I was not painting. After a number of starts and disgusted stops, a slurp of house paint and a few cloth additions it lurched to an exuberant end – for now called 2006 / 2021

At the moment I’m again using ‘any old stuff’ with it’s attendant annoyances – maybe the best way to characterise my current work is some sort of ding-dong between paint and not paint – or possibly a reconciliation?

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