Exhibitions:
Solo:
Situation Gallery, London. 1972
Thomas Gibson, London. 1973
Situation Gallery, London. 1973
Situation Gallery, London. 1974
PMJ Self Gallery, London. 1975
Group:
Gallery House, London. 1973
New Tendencies, Zagreb. 1973
Photo London, London. 2016
Photo London, London. 2017
London Art Fair, London. 2018
Photo London, London. 2019
Photo Paris, Paris. 2020 |
I was born in Leeds, in West Yorkshire, and moved to London in June 1966 to study painting; initially at St. Martin's School of Art, until 1969, and then at the Royal Academy Schools until 1972.
The late Peter Cochrane bought two pieces from my Degree Show at the Academy, and in the Autumn of that year I showed four related 'earthstain' paintings, at ' Situation Gallery', in Horseshoe Yard, off Bond Street.
My second exhibition was made a few months later with Thomas Gibson, at his small, first-floor gallery in New Bond Street; a curious place to show in some respects, as Thomas dealt mainly in old masters then, rather than recent art school graduates.
But all the drawings sold; and two of them resurfaced in 2019, when I had a request from the Rhode Island School of Design Museum to reproduce one of two drawings they had in their collection.
A collector - Richard Brown Baker - had left works in a bequest, to both the MOMA in New York, and the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island; with two of those works being the two drawings of mine that he'd bought from Thomas Gibson in 1973.
So - the world is sometimes a little smaller than we think...
The exhibitions I made at the Situation Gallery, from 1972 to 1974, were mainly of 'earthstain' works; with the exhibition at the PMJ Self Gallery in 1975 being a mixture of earthstain works and photograph pieces. The work shown at Gallery House was essentially 'conceptual', and I hope to put a link to it, and other past exhibitions, at the foot of this page in the not too distant future.
For a while, in the 1970s, I lived in New York, but after moving back to London around 1976, I found myself increasingly drawn towards an exploration of 'language', alongside my visual work. The written word had always been an important part of my notebooks and sketches; and when that was put together with my discovery of the inland waterway system, and the eventual arrival of the computer - a long and rambling journey was begun - sometimes real, sometimes metaphorical - that finally lead to the arrival of 'Another Landscape'.
Along the way, projects merged and projects metamorphosed, but a common thread began to surface in the work; a thread I had been trying to find, and then unravel, since my very first childhood 'inventions'. And when the building of the Olympic Park started in East London - bringing about the bulldozing of hundreds of studio and small business spaces, including my own - I decided it was probably time to head back 'North'.
Marsden, in the hills of West Yorkshire, may be an improbable move from Hackney in East London; but having rebuilt an old stone house by the canal, I now have both a home and an affordable studio space - with the added bonus of free wifi down at the work-space, courtesy of the music making Alastair Hanson next door!
I've decided - for the time being at least - to scale back the breadth of my projects; concentrating for the moment on the Small Excavations/Consellation pieces; the 12 panel photograph pieces - 'Another Landscape', and 'A Passage Of Hours' - and some site-specific earth, stone, and leaf-stain works, alongside my writing.
There will be a link to archive photographs of past exhibitions here, at some point.
And if you have any questions, please do feel free to get in touch.
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