IMAGES

STATEMENT (on the works)

The recent work originated two years ago in an exercise of reviewing and taking stock of the contents of my studio at a point when a new beginning was needed. Reversing what would be a normal strategy, the focus was shifted to the detritus of my practice, to its bi-products, rejected fragments and incidental traces on the studio walls. An important part of this re-focusing was that it allowed the process to be seen as not just a means to an end but as the matrix in which meaning might be found.

Initially the work took the form of photographic inventories. Each scrap of paper, each off-cut of wood, crumpled fragment of drawing, or paint-soaked cloth was recorded separately, altering its status as invisible or redundant and permitting it a provisional meaning. What started as an archive, a methodical ordering of unstable fragments, began to propose new kinds of relationships that were reciprocal and open to question.

This interest in the accidental relationships and secret affinities between things has subsequently expanded, allowing new material to be found or generated. I am concerned with the way that placing elements together prompts an urge to find sense and meaning. We must read across the gaps in information and provide some kind of connective tissue.

Alongside the photographic work I have also been making text/paintings which relate directly to the duration of their making and employ the strategy of listing that was initiated by the inventories. In these works the description of sounds, the recording of passing minutes are qualified by the painstaking process of painting the words or numbers. In making these there has been a consciousness that in the act of listening there are failures to hear and in the attempt to describe there are faulty words.

“What came to the surface was of the nature of the fuzzy, the uncertain, the fugitive and the unfinished, and in the end I chose deliberately to preserve the hesitant and perplexed character of these shapeless scraps, and to abandon the pretence of organising them into something that would by rights have had the appearance (and seductiveness) of an article, with a beginning, a middle and an end”. (G P)

“In every enumeration there are two contradictory temptations. The first is to list everything, the second is to forget something”. (G P)

“Perhaps also it is to……refer thinking back to the unthought on which it rests, and the unclassifiable (the unnameable, the unsayable) which it is so eager to disguise”. (G P)

“How does one think of nothing? How to think of nothing without automatically putting something round that nothing, so turning it into a hole, into which one will hasten to put something, an activity, a function, a destiny, a gaze, a need, a lack, a surplus…..?” (G P)

“My room is situated on the forty-fifth degree of latitude, according to the measurement of Fr Beccaria; it stretches from east to west; it forms a long rectangle, thirty-six paces in circumference if you hug the wall. My journey will, however, measure much more than this, as I will be crossing it frequently lengthwise, or else diagonally, without any rule or method.” (Xavier de Maistre)

BIOGRAPHY