Reveries & Contemplations
My work is about reveries and contemplations; outside the boundaries of common sense, or the representation of what is seen as truthful and therefore virtuous.
These are after Keats' negative capabilities, the products of thinking past the safety of acceptable conclusions into a state of the unknown.
I mark the routes and staging posts of thinking with images and reports sometimes wordless, past the reassurance of the regular and harmonious into the condition of endless not Knowing recorded like an explorer with no phone or support team. I have to use the incidents of my own life as stepping off points for expression. An expression that questions all the learned habits of thought in the act of painting and making.
From an urgent need to reconstruct the world around me rather than fit an existing world of convenient stuff and narrative, I have needed to work trom the ground up
“Even the ground cannot be taken for granted but becomes part of the system of signs that constitutes the work”. Eileen Hooper Greenhill
Collage is a very impetuous activity, unlike painting. When cutting and gluing, any source of the “right” colour, tone, is commandeered for the inner logic of the work. Often at speed.
"I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” John Keats 1817
I use found images and pin them in place on a wall. Unexpected combinations appear that appear and resonate with each other in a way that is not possible unless you are in a space of uncertainties, play and the unexpected. The image of a footballer diving in pain, vibrated next to the Angle in Giotto”s Pieta.
