Collapsing Narrative

The struggle that freedom gives you.

The physical nature of the Culture and Heritage site at the end of an archipelago of towering commercial housing development, squashed between the meandering River Lea and Thames, made me marvel at the endeavour required to make this bit of land habitable, to create solid structure from muddy silt and flowing water. I initially found a strange analogy in the image of my son building train tracks on a swirling carpet. An image previous months of lockdown had made more intense. The boundary between land and water, coming ashore into the port city, was a theme which occupied my mind and linked into an unfinished series of paintings inspired by the experience of taking a Cardboard Gondola to Venice three years before. Narrative painting evolved through layers of both abstract mark making, magical realist description and painterly expression based on these psycho geographies. I turned to Canaletto's paintings of Venice, memories of the lagoon, and the people on that trip to indulge a sentimentality, keep it alive and reinvent it. I allowed a march of abstract, surreal and expressive forms to disrupt the scenes and try and build something engaging. But in some cases the desire for nature to later destroy or wash away most of what had been built, won out. 

I searched for a symbol to make a cardboard sculpture and settled on the building site excavator. i had never intended to finish another large scale sculpture. I no longer had the time to produce something with the accuracy of previous work that at present i had no market for. In all previous cardboard works there had been a moment during the process where a divergence into looser more imaginative work was possible so I set out searching for that moment. It didn't come in the building of the excavator but through a commission to make a Tracey Island children's workshop. My goal was to use techniques appropriate for school children. Use off cuts, gaffer tape, rip card, and simple strong structures. To let something organically grow as much as possible. The shapes immediately interested me and I could see these Islands being the basis for paintings as well. Paintings which were an  escape from the world directly outside the studio and an escape from the confines of my recent concerns. Paintings which were perhaps part of an unknowable world.