RECENT INTERVIEWS
Interview with Deconarch - Art and Architecture magazine
How did you start drawing?
It is hard to pinpoint a start; this is something that I have always considered a part of life – a language or way to comunicate ideas to myself. I do remember getting into trouble as a child for drawing everywhere though...
What does drawing mean for you?
Drawing is such an integral part of my practice that I‘m not sure how I‘d get along without it. Obviously my paintings deal with a form or version of reality, so the actual drawing aspect is very central to the whole process. Above and beyond that however, drawing on a more intimate scale - through works on paper - and indeed just the physical act of mark making is something that feels important to me. It feels very human.
Are there painters who influenced you?
I draw influence from a relatively wide range of sources and for a variety of reasons. Strictly within painting, I find the work of Agnes Martin, Anslem Keifer, Wilhelm Hammershoi, Gerhard Richter, Susan Rothenburg and Ian Mckeever quite influential in terms of either technique or ethos. This barely touches on my interest, but I find them a good place to start. In addition I look at a lot of photography, particularly those artists who continue to dwell in the hand made or analogue worlds. The colodian photographs of Sally Mann for instance have a very painterly feel that definitely finds its way into my work. Aside her, the sheer compostitional mastery of both Thomas Joshua Cooper and Hiroshi Sugimoto fill me with awe.
Can you briefly explain your creative process and the mediums you use?
In many ways my process is traditional; it‘s oil paint on canvas. I mostly work on stretchers that I have constructed myself, due to the fact that for me this is the beginning of the object having its own voice. The actual painting process is divided between the wall and the floor, each day starting with re-drawing the previous days disasters. The day generally ends with me laying the painting flat and using very dilute white washes to mostly cover the days work. Over night the days‘ drawing comes through (hopefully), leaving a sort of remnant or trace that I can react to the following day. Through this action I build a slow history for the image. It can be a very labored, frustrating process, but the time it takes matters. As for other mediums, I use a fair amount of stand oil and turpentine to maintain a degree of transparency.
You are also a photographer, besides being a painter. What difference can you find between these two forms of art?
The primary difference for me is one of time. I‘m not so concerned with the decisive moment and I try to stretch the photographic timescale to get it a little closer to painting. Their seperate characters are what attracts me to the use of both, each process being a way for me to stabilize memory, to give its shadows a form. I don‘t seek to use either as documentary so in that respect I can use them interchangably. However, the main difference for my practice is probably the most obvious; painting has more latitude for selection – I can put in or take out to my hearts content, but with photographs, at least how I chose to make them, I am more concerned with the recording of actual matter. The differences are less hinderances than possibilites, both allowing me to access memory but from different angles.
I was struck with your dim colours and the way you put together human buildings and the coldness of nature (snow, winter). I feel a sense of solitude and loss. Can you tell us more about this?
My colour choices have evolved over time into quite a muted hue range. Colour in the usual sense of the word is incidental and comes as a result of the process, however each colour is chosen rather than arbitrary. An unpopulated place seems to automatically have a sense of loss about it, but I think there is an inherent melancholy present in both my paintings and photographs, since they are both concerned with memory and time passing or time gone. I have a great interest in early photography and its fugitive processes; for example, the long exposures that failed to register people walking on city streets. I see painting with the same eyes – a way to engage with or punctuate my own time as it falls away, and each work becomes a marker in my own history. The paintings are in many ways portraits of loss; a time and a space that has already gone, something seen for the last time. This sense of passing has become more apparent in my most recent architectural works. They are places that we are accustomed to seeing full of people, so their absence is felt more keenly.
In your paintings, the point of view is always on a empty road where nobody walks. Everything is silent and the atmosphere seems frozen – but the titles are for example something like “After me” or “Be lost in me”. Do you see urban space as a metaphor for human condition?
In a way yes, we make urban spaces and most of us huddle together in their comfort. Contrary to this however, we are increasingly isolated and fearful, separating ourselves as much as we can. The disparity however between the emptiness or unpopulated nature of my paintings and their titles, is less concerned with humanity as a condition than it is with understanding my own experience of being human. The ‘me‘ I refer to is an actual me. These places, urban or wilderness, are excavations of memory and as such are more metaphors for my own footsteps and history. That said, the notion of collective memory, or an ‘us‘ is important to me as an idea. Part of the ‘me‘ descibes us as a species and how we cope with the mind/body distinction.
You were born in Great Britain but currently you are living in Germany. Do you think your personal biography and these different places have affected your work in some way?
Relocating to Germany has had quite an impact on my work. The sense of everything being alien and outside of formative experience throws you off balance, and it seems that it doesn‘t change significantly with time. As an artist one is automatically an outsider. Coupled with my unfamiliarity with Germany, this status allows me the freedom to look at my current surroundings with a certain keeness. It‘s difficult to quantify, but probably the best way to demonstrate this is the change in my work from purely landscape based imagery found in places far from home, to a preoccupation with city architecture – I doubt this would have happened if I‘d have stayed in Britain. I needed the exposure.
Have you done any commercial work or will you do it? In this case how do you think commercial work could affect the way you work?
The closest I‘ve ever come to commercial work is making the album cover art for a couple of bands – the most notable being Agalloch‘s ‘Marrow of the Spirit‘. I tried very hard with that project to bring it within my continuing body of work as far as was possible, and I was ultimately very happy with the results. I must admit that I usually find commissioned work quite difficult to do because I constantly feel directed by an unseen hand. I imagine commercial work takes a particular mind set, and I‘m not sure it‘s one that sits very naturally with me.
Any advice to those young artists who aim to become a painter?
If I‘ve got anything useful to impart it‘s that the concept of inspiration is only partially useful. As trite as it sounds, it really is just about the work – if there are problems or struggles, paint your way out of or through them.
Two other events are worth noting, and say the same thing in different ways: I once saw a short interview with Frank Auerbach, and he remarked that painting isn‘t a game of success, and that is definitely something worth passing on. Secondly, the day I left art school, the professor told me something that I‘ve remembered ever since – a career in painting is eighty years, not six months.
What is on your horizon? Any running or upcoming projects?
After a quiet, reflective year, I have a number of exhibitions coming up in Europe and America in 2013. I will be updating my website with specifics as they become fixed. It‘s going to be busy!
A question you will never answer to, is...
‘My room has a particular colour scheme... Could you paint something to match my sofa and curtains?‘ I will simply walk away without answering!
How did you start drawing?
It is hard to pinpoint a start; this is something that I have always considered a part of life – a language or way to comunicate ideas to myself. I do remember getting into trouble as a child for drawing everywhere though...
What does drawing mean for you?
Drawing is such an integral part of my practice that I‘m not sure how I‘d get along without it. Obviously my paintings deal with a form or version of reality, so the actual drawing aspect is very central to the whole process. Above and beyond that however, drawing on a more intimate scale - through works on paper - and indeed just the physical act of mark making is something that feels important to me. It feels very human.
Are there painters who influenced you?
I draw influence from a relatively wide range of sources and for a variety of reasons. Strictly within painting, I find the work of Agnes Martin, Anslem Keifer, Wilhelm Hammershoi, Gerhard Richter, Susan Rothenburg and Ian Mckeever quite influential in terms of either technique or ethos. This barely touches on my interest, but I find them a good place to start. In addition I look at a lot of photography, particularly those artists who continue to dwell in the hand made or analogue worlds. The colodian photographs of Sally Mann for instance have a very painterly feel that definitely finds its way into my work. Aside her, the sheer compostitional mastery of both Thomas Joshua Cooper and Hiroshi Sugimoto fill me with awe.
Can you briefly explain your creative process and the mediums you use?
In many ways my process is traditional; it‘s oil paint on canvas. I mostly work on stretchers that I have constructed myself, due to the fact that for me this is the beginning of the object having its own voice. The actual painting process is divided between the wall and the floor, each day starting with re-drawing the previous days disasters. The day generally ends with me laying the painting flat and using very dilute white washes to mostly cover the days work. Over night the days‘ drawing comes through (hopefully), leaving a sort of remnant or trace that I can react to the following day. Through this action I build a slow history for the image. It can be a very labored, frustrating process, but the time it takes matters. As for other mediums, I use a fair amount of stand oil and turpentine to maintain a degree of transparency.
You are also a photographer, besides being a painter. What difference can you find between these two forms of art?
The primary difference for me is one of time. I‘m not so concerned with the decisive moment and I try to stretch the photographic timescale to get it a little closer to painting. Their seperate characters are what attracts me to the use of both, each process being a way for me to stabilize memory, to give its shadows a form. I don‘t seek to use either as documentary so in that respect I can use them interchangably. However, the main difference for my practice is probably the most obvious; painting has more latitude for selection – I can put in or take out to my hearts content, but with photographs, at least how I chose to make them, I am more concerned with the recording of actual matter. The differences are less hinderances than possibilites, both allowing me to access memory but from different angles.
I was struck with your dim colours and the way you put together human buildings and the coldness of nature (snow, winter). I feel a sense of solitude and loss. Can you tell us more about this?
My colour choices have evolved over time into quite a muted hue range. Colour in the usual sense of the word is incidental and comes as a result of the process, however each colour is chosen rather than arbitrary. An unpopulated place seems to automatically have a sense of loss about it, but I think there is an inherent melancholy present in both my paintings and photographs, since they are both concerned with memory and time passing or time gone. I have a great interest in early photography and its fugitive processes; for example, the long exposures that failed to register people walking on city streets. I see painting with the same eyes – a way to engage with or punctuate my own time as it falls away, and each work becomes a marker in my own history. The paintings are in many ways portraits of loss; a time and a space that has already gone, something seen for the last time. This sense of passing has become more apparent in my most recent architectural works. They are places that we are accustomed to seeing full of people, so their absence is felt more keenly.
In your paintings, the point of view is always on a empty road where nobody walks. Everything is silent and the atmosphere seems frozen – but the titles are for example something like “After me” or “Be lost in me”. Do you see urban space as a metaphor for human condition?
In a way yes, we make urban spaces and most of us huddle together in their comfort. Contrary to this however, we are increasingly isolated and fearful, separating ourselves as much as we can. The disparity however between the emptiness or unpopulated nature of my paintings and their titles, is less concerned with humanity as a condition than it is with understanding my own experience of being human. The ‘me‘ I refer to is an actual me. These places, urban or wilderness, are excavations of memory and as such are more metaphors for my own footsteps and history. That said, the notion of collective memory, or an ‘us‘ is important to me as an idea. Part of the ‘me‘ descibes us as a species and how we cope with the mind/body distinction.
You were born in Great Britain but currently you are living in Germany. Do you think your personal biography and these different places have affected your work in some way?
Relocating to Germany has had quite an impact on my work. The sense of everything being alien and outside of formative experience throws you off balance, and it seems that it doesn‘t change significantly with time. As an artist one is automatically an outsider. Coupled with my unfamiliarity with Germany, this status allows me the freedom to look at my current surroundings with a certain keeness. It‘s difficult to quantify, but probably the best way to demonstrate this is the change in my work from purely landscape based imagery found in places far from home, to a preoccupation with city architecture – I doubt this would have happened if I‘d have stayed in Britain. I needed the exposure.
Have you done any commercial work or will you do it? In this case how do you think commercial work could affect the way you work?
The closest I‘ve ever come to commercial work is making the album cover art for a couple of bands – the most notable being Agalloch‘s ‘Marrow of the Spirit‘. I tried very hard with that project to bring it within my continuing body of work as far as was possible, and I was ultimately very happy with the results. I must admit that I usually find commissioned work quite difficult to do because I constantly feel directed by an unseen hand. I imagine commercial work takes a particular mind set, and I‘m not sure it‘s one that sits very naturally with me.
Any advice to those young artists who aim to become a painter?
If I‘ve got anything useful to impart it‘s that the concept of inspiration is only partially useful. As trite as it sounds, it really is just about the work – if there are problems or struggles, paint your way out of or through them.
Two other events are worth noting, and say the same thing in different ways: I once saw a short interview with Frank Auerbach, and he remarked that painting isn‘t a game of success, and that is definitely something worth passing on. Secondly, the day I left art school, the professor told me something that I‘ve remembered ever since – a career in painting is eighty years, not six months.
What is on your horizon? Any running or upcoming projects?
After a quiet, reflective year, I have a number of exhibitions coming up in Europe and America in 2013. I will be updating my website with specifics as they become fixed. It‘s going to be busy!
A question you will never answer to, is...
‘My room has a particular colour scheme... Could you paint something to match my sofa and curtains?‘ I will simply walk away without answering!
Recent interview with Empty Kingdom Magazine
Can you please introduce yourself? Where are you from? What struck you about painting? How long have you been an artist?
Originally from the flat fenlands around Peterborough, I went to study in London before eventually leaving the UK; first to southern Germany and I have recently settled in Sweden.
I have felt the need to decode the world through images since I was very young, but I became aware at around the age of 14 that painting was the thing that truly mattered. There was something about the slowing down of time that painting required - the fixing of an image over time - that held my attention and still does. Not including a combination of mostly awful and sometimes useful part time jobs in the early days, I have painted full time for the last 15 years.
In your bio you state that your paintings are works of memory, that you don't seek to illustrate a particular place, how can this be? If they are memories, are they not inherently tied to a location? How through your work do you seek to escape being bound to a location?
Location and memory are of course closely linked, but the act of remembering over time and the action of living with that memory, alter it, shape it. As details fall away the mind fills in the gaps, ultimately creating a personal version of place that becomes far more dear than the initial experience. In the same way that the mere action of trying to measure something minutely alters the thing being measured, I sense that memory works in a similar way; we squeeze and shape the initial moment as we move further away from it. Rather than being a loss, I cannot help but think of this as a more meaningful interpretation of reality - the perceived image of a place is the predominant fix, but what else makes memory? We change from moment to moment and everything that is linked to that time shifts with it. Time is also a factor within the process of painting. With each painting taking between one and three months, my experience of the memory changes as I go along and is fundamentally steered by both it’s fugitive nature and the imperfect calligraphy of painting.
Memories can be concrete, and they can be elusive, how do you decide which to depict? How do they come to you? Do you have a practice, a ritual to call important memories? Are they of a theme? Once you've chosen the memory you wish to depict, what do you do with it, mentally, to study before putting brush to canvas?
The two words you used to describe memory are an apt description of the decision making process. There is an increasing amount of material to work with as the years pass, but what I’ve noticed is that the ‘fixing’ of an image into some kind of concrete form, from a landscape of elusive shifting sands, is mostly intuitive. There is a definite link between the internal and external worlds - the glimpses of place that settle into memory are some kind of mirror image of a private landscape that I feel I need to understand or communicate. I wouldn’t exactly say that the images become obsessional, but there is a need involved. Once the space starts to solidify it’s very hard to turn back.
At the start of all this, I did seem to require some degree of ritual or ‘mood creator’. Music became the trigger that reliably returned me to that sense of place, but now it’s always there. The separation between the two worlds is less distinct and I can move between them far more easily. The action of generating subject matter was fraught with a kind of necessary anxiety, but even though that unease is still there, the evolution of my practice has become self generating - a perpetual motion of fragments that require understanding.
Once a place has come into focus there is very little actual choice involved, and I feel driven to see it through. I wouldn’t exactly say that I meditate on the image, but my mind does wander through an imagined three dimensional rendering of the memory - exploring the unseen aspects so that I know how to imply the distances. This study flattens the image down into a two dimensional illusion that I can then edge towards in painting. Up until now I have felt compelled to focus on one image at a time without diverting my attention, but at the moment I feel a crowding at the edges and will try to move between memories as I build this next body of work.
You said you are preoccupied with photographs taken during the last moments of the day. What about this time of day appeals to you? What does it mean to you? How are you left feeling as this time passes each day? How can one capture a time of day, or do you seek to capture anything of this time of day in your photographs? Or is it the lighting, the aura, that speaks to you?
I’m not sure I’m capable of capturing anything of the last moments of the day in terms of actual emotional content. There is so much subtlety and an implicit nostalgia or melancholy that could become a life’s work in and of itself. All I can hope to do is use the camera to see things that I can’t as the light washes out. There is both a sense of loss and becoming for me in those times - losing the light and ability to understand distance, but also the feeling of the gaze turning a little more inwards; seeing inwards and outwards at the same time. The simple ritual of loading a camera, feeling the right place and time to be present, is really all I can do to understand my own time passing. The photographs are a way of prolonging my own experience of visible time… being greedy for more existence.
You've chosen a very stark palatte, black and white, with hints of tan, brown, and blue. What about these colors speak to you? Are these the colors of memory? Your pieces combine moments of finite definition, often in buildings, with more ethereal, abstract backgrounds, skies, surfaces, is this a reflection of what stands out to you as you reach back in memory? Or is it some other meaningful idea you seek to express?
Colour as a subject is something that I have inevitably had to understand and define my relationship to. The palette that has evolved over the years is restrained, and at times contradicts our general experience of reality. I deal with real things - architecture, the city, landscape, water - so to a certain extent we have expectations of how these things are portrayed and how the world is supposed to behave. I didn’t exactly set my work up in opposition to this, but it does seem to have turned out that way.
As with our perception of dreams, for me colour drains from memory, or at least the ones I seek to work with. As I mentally traverse the places that become fixed as paintings, it’s form that becomes important; tone and temperature, rather than peculiarity and depth of hue.
With regards shifting planes and what is brought into focus, this is more about my reflections on the nature of sight and how I make sense of my place in the world. Peripheral vision is by definition insubstantial, yet we understand the objects it contains. I hope to make paintings that work the same way - images that respond to at least my eyes as remembered sight rather than documentary recording. This inevitably carries an emotional weight because I’m steering the viewer where I want them to go.
As you explore your memory, what do you learn about your work, your expression, and yourself? How has your work been informative into who you are, how you've become yourself, and who you want to be as you grow and evolve? Has your work evolved with you as you've grown?
My work and I are both very separate and yet indistinguishable. Sometimes I feel like the metaphor of the mind/body distinction is the most appropriate way of looking at it, but am I the vehicle that the work looks out of, or do I look out through the work? Maybe a bit of both. I do definitely feel driven by the images though, and my subconscious changes them whether I’m ready to let go of a subject or not. The twinned evolution of me as person and me as image is far from a straight line, but I get the feeling that if I take the long view they more or less balance out.
What are you working on currently? Where are you working, inside your mind, or memory?
One of the aforementioned evolutionary shifts is currently happening in my work. I moved to Sweden in October of last year, and the different environment has changed things in an unexpected way. Exploring a new city that contains so much of the architectural style that I respond to, has rather perversely edged me away from the urban and towards the glimpsed, often ignored places where the built up ceases and trees take over. For me it’s like coming full circle - back to experiences of my first travels to Scandinavia back in 1998. One could say that I’m occupying both my mind and memory at present; seeing the new through the lens of the old.
Often random memories fire out of nowhere, a day we got ice cream in 3rd grade, when we crashed a bike riding home in high school, what's the last random memory that came to you?
Coming full circle, as it were, and ending up back in Scandinavia after my first visit nearly 20 years ago, I do seem to get a variety of flash backs that jump around in time and place. One that keeps returning is of a small town in the far north of Norway called Alta. I remember getting off a bus on a Tuesday evening, finding myself in a community of blocky, functional buildings, and being greeted by the sinking realisation that the campsite was a heartbreaking 4km away, back in the direction from which I’d just come (and just why are campsites always 4km from the nearest bus stop?). And so, I started to walk. The town quickly melted away, and as I muttered under my breath about the unfairness of Norwegian route planning, I found myself on the main road out of town. It was at that point that I looked up and realised the northern lights were arcing green across the sky, silently illuminating my path towards shelter. What I remember most is how the isolation transitioned from lonely to alone. I am yet to return to Alta, but know I will.
Can you please introduce yourself? Where are you from? What struck you about painting? How long have you been an artist?
Originally from the flat fenlands around Peterborough, I went to study in London before eventually leaving the UK; first to southern Germany and I have recently settled in Sweden.
I have felt the need to decode the world through images since I was very young, but I became aware at around the age of 14 that painting was the thing that truly mattered. There was something about the slowing down of time that painting required - the fixing of an image over time - that held my attention and still does. Not including a combination of mostly awful and sometimes useful part time jobs in the early days, I have painted full time for the last 15 years.
In your bio you state that your paintings are works of memory, that you don't seek to illustrate a particular place, how can this be? If they are memories, are they not inherently tied to a location? How through your work do you seek to escape being bound to a location?
Location and memory are of course closely linked, but the act of remembering over time and the action of living with that memory, alter it, shape it. As details fall away the mind fills in the gaps, ultimately creating a personal version of place that becomes far more dear than the initial experience. In the same way that the mere action of trying to measure something minutely alters the thing being measured, I sense that memory works in a similar way; we squeeze and shape the initial moment as we move further away from it. Rather than being a loss, I cannot help but think of this as a more meaningful interpretation of reality - the perceived image of a place is the predominant fix, but what else makes memory? We change from moment to moment and everything that is linked to that time shifts with it. Time is also a factor within the process of painting. With each painting taking between one and three months, my experience of the memory changes as I go along and is fundamentally steered by both it’s fugitive nature and the imperfect calligraphy of painting.
Memories can be concrete, and they can be elusive, how do you decide which to depict? How do they come to you? Do you have a practice, a ritual to call important memories? Are they of a theme? Once you've chosen the memory you wish to depict, what do you do with it, mentally, to study before putting brush to canvas?
The two words you used to describe memory are an apt description of the decision making process. There is an increasing amount of material to work with as the years pass, but what I’ve noticed is that the ‘fixing’ of an image into some kind of concrete form, from a landscape of elusive shifting sands, is mostly intuitive. There is a definite link between the internal and external worlds - the glimpses of place that settle into memory are some kind of mirror image of a private landscape that I feel I need to understand or communicate. I wouldn’t exactly say that the images become obsessional, but there is a need involved. Once the space starts to solidify it’s very hard to turn back.
At the start of all this, I did seem to require some degree of ritual or ‘mood creator’. Music became the trigger that reliably returned me to that sense of place, but now it’s always there. The separation between the two worlds is less distinct and I can move between them far more easily. The action of generating subject matter was fraught with a kind of necessary anxiety, but even though that unease is still there, the evolution of my practice has become self generating - a perpetual motion of fragments that require understanding.
Once a place has come into focus there is very little actual choice involved, and I feel driven to see it through. I wouldn’t exactly say that I meditate on the image, but my mind does wander through an imagined three dimensional rendering of the memory - exploring the unseen aspects so that I know how to imply the distances. This study flattens the image down into a two dimensional illusion that I can then edge towards in painting. Up until now I have felt compelled to focus on one image at a time without diverting my attention, but at the moment I feel a crowding at the edges and will try to move between memories as I build this next body of work.
You said you are preoccupied with photographs taken during the last moments of the day. What about this time of day appeals to you? What does it mean to you? How are you left feeling as this time passes each day? How can one capture a time of day, or do you seek to capture anything of this time of day in your photographs? Or is it the lighting, the aura, that speaks to you?
I’m not sure I’m capable of capturing anything of the last moments of the day in terms of actual emotional content. There is so much subtlety and an implicit nostalgia or melancholy that could become a life’s work in and of itself. All I can hope to do is use the camera to see things that I can’t as the light washes out. There is both a sense of loss and becoming for me in those times - losing the light and ability to understand distance, but also the feeling of the gaze turning a little more inwards; seeing inwards and outwards at the same time. The simple ritual of loading a camera, feeling the right place and time to be present, is really all I can do to understand my own time passing. The photographs are a way of prolonging my own experience of visible time… being greedy for more existence.
You've chosen a very stark palatte, black and white, with hints of tan, brown, and blue. What about these colors speak to you? Are these the colors of memory? Your pieces combine moments of finite definition, often in buildings, with more ethereal, abstract backgrounds, skies, surfaces, is this a reflection of what stands out to you as you reach back in memory? Or is it some other meaningful idea you seek to express?
Colour as a subject is something that I have inevitably had to understand and define my relationship to. The palette that has evolved over the years is restrained, and at times contradicts our general experience of reality. I deal with real things - architecture, the city, landscape, water - so to a certain extent we have expectations of how these things are portrayed and how the world is supposed to behave. I didn’t exactly set my work up in opposition to this, but it does seem to have turned out that way.
As with our perception of dreams, for me colour drains from memory, or at least the ones I seek to work with. As I mentally traverse the places that become fixed as paintings, it’s form that becomes important; tone and temperature, rather than peculiarity and depth of hue.
With regards shifting planes and what is brought into focus, this is more about my reflections on the nature of sight and how I make sense of my place in the world. Peripheral vision is by definition insubstantial, yet we understand the objects it contains. I hope to make paintings that work the same way - images that respond to at least my eyes as remembered sight rather than documentary recording. This inevitably carries an emotional weight because I’m steering the viewer where I want them to go.
As you explore your memory, what do you learn about your work, your expression, and yourself? How has your work been informative into who you are, how you've become yourself, and who you want to be as you grow and evolve? Has your work evolved with you as you've grown?
My work and I are both very separate and yet indistinguishable. Sometimes I feel like the metaphor of the mind/body distinction is the most appropriate way of looking at it, but am I the vehicle that the work looks out of, or do I look out through the work? Maybe a bit of both. I do definitely feel driven by the images though, and my subconscious changes them whether I’m ready to let go of a subject or not. The twinned evolution of me as person and me as image is far from a straight line, but I get the feeling that if I take the long view they more or less balance out.
What are you working on currently? Where are you working, inside your mind, or memory?
One of the aforementioned evolutionary shifts is currently happening in my work. I moved to Sweden in October of last year, and the different environment has changed things in an unexpected way. Exploring a new city that contains so much of the architectural style that I respond to, has rather perversely edged me away from the urban and towards the glimpsed, often ignored places where the built up ceases and trees take over. For me it’s like coming full circle - back to experiences of my first travels to Scandinavia back in 1998. One could say that I’m occupying both my mind and memory at present; seeing the new through the lens of the old.
Often random memories fire out of nowhere, a day we got ice cream in 3rd grade, when we crashed a bike riding home in high school, what's the last random memory that came to you?
Coming full circle, as it were, and ending up back in Scandinavia after my first visit nearly 20 years ago, I do seem to get a variety of flash backs that jump around in time and place. One that keeps returning is of a small town in the far north of Norway called Alta. I remember getting off a bus on a Tuesday evening, finding myself in a community of blocky, functional buildings, and being greeted by the sinking realisation that the campsite was a heartbreaking 4km away, back in the direction from which I’d just come (and just why are campsites always 4km from the nearest bus stop?). And so, I started to walk. The town quickly melted away, and as I muttered under my breath about the unfairness of Norwegian route planning, I found myself on the main road out of town. It was at that point that I looked up and realised the northern lights were arcing green across the sky, silently illuminating my path towards shelter. What I remember most is how the isolation transitioned from lonely to alone. I am yet to return to Alta, but know I will.
