Artist’s Statement

In his book ‘The Gift’, Lewis Hyde sites the example of Harold Pinter who wrote about his play ‘The Birthday Party’
“The thing germinated and bred itself……… It was determined by its own engendering image”
This notion is recognised by artists of all genres, but often re-interpreted as the enduring cliché of the artist as ‘conduit’ for some slightly mystical process that has no critical edge or acuity of purpose. This is far from the artistic truth but it is difficult to explain the state of mind that originates its ‘own engendering image’ with rational or intellectual frames of reference.

In order to reach the condition of ‘unconscious awareness’ necessary for genuinely new insights to inform the creative process, an artist must temporarily let go of rationality and reason. Art critics and cultural theorists are naturally sceptical of artists who attempt to describe such seeming madness, and many thousands of words are expended attempting to interpret artworks logically, therefore contorting the poetical into the dialectical. As someone who works within that extemporary space, I am often not able to use words to interpret my own work satisfactorily, it frequently seems more natural to me to understand a particular painting by painting another painting.
In the same way it is difficult to describe the political aspects of my work. For me political re-actions are connected to passionate feelings and the work I produce is symptomatic of deeply held convictions, a type of passive ‘activism’. Therefore, as an artist, I do not presume to have solutions to difficult and complex political problems, or the arguments to challenge specific hegemonies. I merely try to understand and interpret visually, and in this way discover how my own sense of despair at examples of inhumanity is tempered by an admiration for the human spirit, and its propensity to endure and to survive, in the face of more and more examples of extreme brutality.

Largely, with a few rare exceptions, the people I paint are nameless. They are ‘the disappeared’, the ‘discarded’, ‘the disenfranchised’. They are ‘numbers’ or ‘casualties’ or ‘statistics’, - so easy to ‘deny’ even if they do simultaneously invoke ‘compassion’, and , as their ‘engendering images’ seemingly manifest themselves upon my canvases, paint becomes no less visceral than blood to me, and I am transfixed by their predicaments.
Even if we do manage to live in a state of denial about the human tragedies that occur daily in some part of the world, and to the atrocity of torture, or to crippling poverty and unfathomable injustice, the moral imprint of mutilated and wasted life somehow infiltrates into the ‘collective unconsciousness’ .
We must surely be, at least subliminally, haunted by the people who are affected by these things as they cast shadows over our comfort zones.

The numbers and facts are enlightening and sobering, 1,197,469 Iraqi civilian deaths since the invasion? - 3% of 9.2 million asylum seekers worldwide accepted by Britain? - 42% of applications rejected? In 2007, 322 Palestinians killed in comparison with 8 Israelis.
My only way of interpreting this information, and making ‘sense’ of it, is to commemorate the human cost by interpreting it through my own idiosyncratic process, by attempting to define the shadows, to delineate the vestiges of human shapes that belong to people who are lost or injured too senselessly in a world that should, by now, have learned to take more care of them.