Materials: About a metre square Arches paper, compressed charcoal, spray fix, black oil paint

Equipment: Masking tape, coarse sandpaper, garden broom, small pointing trowel

Made the frame the usual way. Tending toward a thinner frame, resembling, it seems to me, a hand printed black and white photo frame. I worked in a darkroom for a while and remember the thrill of the alchemical processes, the risk of pushing things too far, knowing when to stop. I like the excitement and fear when confronted with the delimited area.

Once the frame is made what happens next is unplanned. I’m coarsely grating compressed charcoal over the paper mixed with the sweepings from the previous work. I look around the studio. There’s a broom here, part plastic part wire bristle, from the garden. I’m brushing the width of the head across the paper. It’s making beautiful lines, picking out shapes from the cardboard beneath. Shadows. It’s difficult not to think strata, radar, horizon, sky, cloud. I’m mark making, interacting with material. I’m not trying to represent landscape. But the human mind, in league with senses, does what it does and once done its hard to undo, though its fun to try. Without language everything would be two dimensional. With language even two dimensions become three. It’s fun to remind oneself, force oneself, to go back from three to two.

Now I’m confronted with this moody flat landscape and I want to place some oily sculpture into it.

I poke the thin trowel into the tube of paint as far as it will go and pull out a sort of wedge of oil paint. A shining black sliver of potential.

I place the point on the brushed pencil lines where they meet the dust and push the flat of the blade onto the paper slightly drawing it upward. Paint squelches out the sides and blurs at the top. I repeat, trying to divide up the paper equally.

At this point I might apply my tracing paper technique with the Stanley knife blade and see what happens. But I like these strange little monoliths all in a line. Pilgrims? Refugees? Soldiers?

None of the above.

Smears of paint and manipulated carbon on paper.

Time to take myself seriously. Take art seriously. Need a serious space.

Nearing the end of the holiday I have a bunch of used tape and oil paint left. It metamorphosises into this – a sort of three dimensional emergence out of the two dimensional as a manifestation of my imaginings on the interaction between time space and matter as present and future collide.

I don’t like it much but the enlarged details of the paint applied like clay is great. When i worked with clay I’d work quickly and build up form incrementally bit by bit then detail in smaller and smaller pieces using tools only when fingers were too big.

Palm trees go into me here in vast numbers. So one comes out of me.

Is there a mysterious coagulation of matter in time and space as present meets future?

Thoughtless mark making splodging oil onto A3 tracing paper. I like using tracing paper because its robust and noisy and doesn’t mind masking tape. It allows light onto it and through it. I seem to see male and female forms engaged in a kind of flamenco.

On holiday in Andalusia I went for a walk every morning and thought some more about what tomorrow looks like before we arrive there. In the West we almost imagine it as a stage that we walk onto as it manifests in the present. But where is it until that point? If it somehow exists then don’t we also exist in the future? Is there a sort of folding going on somewhere? Or is the world in a constant state of coming into existence, of worlding? What does either scenario look like?

Consider a mountain. Big. Old. Heavy. It has surface and depth. It is knowable and unknowable. You are on the mountains surface and you can see it. It’s there in your present.

You plan to come back tomorrow.

You know it will be there.

But where is it in the meantime?

Between now and tomorrow?

Is it already there, waiting? A stage with all its props?

Oil and carbon on paper (approx 140/140cm)

I think I was looking to introduce more structure to the surreal blobbiness of the previous two paintings. There are some fabulous textures here that are best seen in the flesh. All the paintings are made very quickly once the frame is painted. A matter of minutes.

Approx 100/100cm

Carbon, fixative, paper (130/70 cm)

I made the frame as usual then didn’t do anything with it for weeks. It just sat there daring me to act. Sometimes I have to sneak up on myself if I am to act completely without thought or intent. I did this almost in passing. An act of defiance against the contained expanse of blankness.

It’s called In but nothing here is In at all. Only On. The shaded object seems to be in a wobbly window. Does the window reveal only part of a bigger object? The window itself is in a frame. Or is it one object responding to the frame, captured in the process of falling, floating, bouncing, flying. Is the window moving, revealing different parts of the object? But its an illusion. A pretence. They’re just marks. The records of gestures on an area of surface. My eyes relate them, my brain collaborates and language facilitates. In reverse, without language, everything we see would be two dimensional. Flat. On.