Paintings from the 2024 Neo-Geo: a ‘new geography’ of the subconscious series

I let the shapes, forms and lines emerge intuitively, the decisions made are more visceral than intellectual. I don’t know what the end result will be until I reach the point of ‘this is it’.
“The immediate sensory event becomes the mediating medium of non-verbal knowledge, the sensory experience becomes the foundation of knowledge and understanding”. (Prof. Dirk van der Meulen)

An older piece (Split, 1993) comes into dialogue with newer works (Flow, 2018 and Growth, 2022) in the back space.
A video loop, Down the Pan from the series What didn’t happen to me in Berlin (2006) finds an appropriate location in the project space’s toilet.
Sculpture Garden (2014 – 2018) is accompanied by new paintings in the front space.

I was very happy to exhibit with three former co-students from our 1996/97 Chelsea Art School days: Sara Björnsdottir (Reykjavik), Elizabeth Russell (Vancouver) and Silke Thoss (Berlin)

Here to there and back   2018 Projektraum Blah-Blah, Berlin

Four sculptures, three new and one very old, combine industrially produced elements – steel, rubber, acetate – and more unpredictable materials – wax, plaster, expanding foam and soot. The Minimalist aesthetic presents a pared down statement that change is possible within a given structure or system.

Flow, 2018, rubber mat, plaster
Swing, 2018, steel wire and support, wax
BPS, 2018, steel tubes, spray foam
Smoke, 1994, acetate, wire, smoke deposits

A playful, garden-like collection of works produced since 2014. The works are sometimes this, sometimes that. The idea takes form; that it takes the form it needs is the goal.

The Greatorex Street synagogue was no longer in use, the building had been squatted, set alight and flooded, and was in very bad repair. Without adding new components, I completely renovated the reception room to stand as a reminder that human intentions, wishes and energies are required to maintain a particular vision of the world. When these are withdrawn, atrophy gives rise to another order of reality that pays little heed to the desires of humans.

The surface as a barrier and the desire to permeate this barrier, in this instance unfulfilled, was the concept behind Object of Desire. Layers of acetate, distorted by heat and trapping strands of hair, are wired together to form an enticing space that the viewer is barred from entering. The whole seductively gleams in projected light. Desire is frustrated. The viewer can only stand outside in reflections, projections, glimmers and shadows.

Installation in King’s Lynn Art Centre, a former storage depot. Split ‘extended’ the space of the gallery beyond its physical boundaries into an image of the internal private space where dreams and wishes exist. As viewers walked through the beams they peopled this illusory space as dark shadows, projections moving through a field of red light.