These drawings are interrogations of one of my recent sculptures  (Data Flow, red sandstone, 2018) from which I used frottage to lift a 2d image. I intend to feed the data back into a production circle. Why? to attempt to disrupt my linear relationship with making , causation and time. Im interested in the non-conceptual . What is beneath. The product gives me ideas that are then not directly used in art but in thought. I don’t start with an idea, in fact i don’t start at all. Rather I behave with intention and interact with materials (the material) then examine (as opposed to making Illustration which is the art of externality). My intention in this case was to make a profiled object and then shatter the external elements ie smash the fragile parts leaving an apparently broken but in fact created landscape of remnant surface and exposed core – a sort of post-my-modernist gesture. But in the end the amount of work (time/energy) I expended/invested made this an impossible step to take. I didn’t have the will. This is in itself of interest. As though my modernist heritage is too dominant.

(There is another element to this that I find difficult to address. As I was making it, through a series of unintended consequences, it came to symbolise Grenfell Tower. My uncle was the architect who designed and built Grenfell Tower. As I made this sculpture it became about my relationship with him and the tower as I started to recognise its brutalist influence on me – from an early age I was aware of it. Having it pointed out to me as a child whilst being driven along the Westway (a modernist masterpiece in its own right, that unintentionally created a literal sub-culture of its own in Ladbroke Grove). My Father and Uncle grew up in Ladbroke Grove, where I was born and spent my early years. My Uncle still lives there in the house where he was a child. He could see his building burning from his flat. I had no thought of Grenfell as i started making this piece. It was intended as a structure that I could demolish to leave a fractured outline of form. I cut the stone but when I started to demolish the slats I realised I had not cut it deep enough and what would be left was not a jagged but a recessed outline and I was left with a tower block-like sculpture that I associated with Grenfell and so to actually break off the protrudencies  became impossible. My Uncle was proud of the structure he had built and would speak to me of how as an architect, his aim was to build structures to which communities of humans would give meaning. The terrible ironies kept piling up as post-modern aesthetics required the cladding of brutal modernism, yet the processes of post-modern decision making led to a brutal end of what had indeed become a community).