One’s work is always evolving. This might seem like a truism so blindingly obvious that it does not need stating, however with regard to my practice, I think it does.

Over the years it seems my work has grown more and more out of, or into, Minimalist and Conceptual traditions, at least that’s how I think of it. However, the resultant work has been described as a poetic conceptualism, which I do like. Though each body of work may deal with specific issues relating to that work and the subject matter represented, the same conceptual concern with time, difference and repetition, runs throughout.

Since 1998 and the completion of ‘121 Portraits’ I have worked in the form of extended series, very often producing at least 100 photographs in each series. Throughout each year I work on a number of different series, which then becomes a repetitive cycle until they develop into something. That ‘something’ is usually when I have at least 100 photographs in a series. For me, this way of working, which has evolved organically, gets rid of infatuation and means it is the whole rather than the single image that is most important – though this is not to discount the importance of the individual image. This emphasizes the process of production and removes a sense of self from the work. It is not, however, a mechanistic churning out of 100 photographs. Through the process of working one is seeking a discovery that causes the desire to produce at least 100 photographs. In this way it is the work that drives the desire and impetus. The different series are worked on for an extended period of time spanning many years.

The website shows a selection of, past work which has been finished and/or exhibited, and current work which is still on going. Each page represents a sample from the respective body of work.

Paul Wood said of Conceptual Art:

‘This is the kind of thing that tries the patience of the sceptic. Ironically, in the face of such manifestations of Conceptual art, one can do little other than echo Michael Fried’s claim made in respect of modernist painting: if one doesn’t feel they are superb paintings, then ‘no critical arguments can take the place of feeling it’. What it means to feel convinced of an endless series of numbers, or a wall full of closed books that you know contain nothing but dates, or a minutely differentiated series of canvases is a fair question. Insofar as there is an answer, it perhaps lies in the realm of our responses to the sublime, a sense of our limitations in the face of boundlessness, the oceanic; as well as of a certain humility when one’s more or less frenetic, more or less trivial daily round fetches up against the stillness of a monastic sense of devotion, rendered only the more inaccessible by the complete absence of any validating deity. Conversely, what is evoked could just as well be taken as a kind of anti-sublime: something like the drudgery of assembly line work, the endless cycle of production-as-production. What is it to centre your life around such a form of production, apparently pointless, apparently empty, eventually taking on its own justification (like life itself)? It is an open question whether we regard the work of these artists as close to being a kind of sacrifice, or a kind of self-imposed life sentence: as if Zen-like passivity meets a hollowed-out capitalist madness coming the other way.

(Wood, P. 2002, Conceptual Art: Movements in Moderrn Art, Tate Publishing, Londo

Previous Exhibitions

Walsall Open Exhibition: 5 Feb-24 March 2001. The New Art Gallery, Walsall.

‘121 Portraits’: Solo show at Impressions Gallery, York, 30 May-26 July 1999.

‘Arrangements’: Montage Gallery, Derby, 2 Feb-17 March 1996.

‘Fish Tales’: Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, Essex,
5 Oct-20 Nov 1992.