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More drawing, here using tape discarded from previous work on MDF scarred by previous work. The form can be directly sourced back to my stone work, blocky and monolithic. The images are again snake-like. A slippery slide down into the depths where raw unconscious data swirls like atoms in a particle collider

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Clearing out Uncle Nigel’s flat I unearthed an unused pad of 53gsm A3 Typo paper, a box of compressed carbon and some rolls of masking tape. I tore a strip of tape and stuck it on the last sheet of paper, drew over it with a stick of compressed charcoal in one gesture then flipped the next sheet over and retraced. I repeated to the beginning of the pad with the form becoming less distinct page by page.

I am left with a receding form as though of a great sea monster glimpsed near the surface then slowly sinking, disappearing into the abyss.

The Abyss is of course the Unconscious. Sea monsters from myth are really messengers or messages from the Unconscious. They are symbols. What are they symbols of? That’s where it gets interesting.

But while I was making the work I was thinking of how we are all forgotten eventually.

There are 50 plus drawings. I’d love to see them all displayed one day.

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Impotent anger caused by watching the news channeled into self-portrait

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Further experimentation with materials and processes trying to increase the revelatory nature of the work by decreasing my direct hand. In some I started using carbon grated into olive oil, placed another piece of paper on top and scraped with a Stanley blade, then peeled away the paper creating marvelous effects. Here some are rather like Rorschachs ink blots but with the mirror image removed. In others I worked directly on the homemade oil paint with the blade making a square moon reflecting on black hills of the unconscious realm: The Underworld.

made a frame from tape and filled with carbon and spray fix then pounded the paper with the tips of compressed charcoal crayons filling the area with positive and negative shapes. The black mark-shapes relate to eachother and the white space-shapes connect to eachother. The temptation to use them as a game, a maze or a narrative, is left to the viewer.

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paper left over from previous drawing looked like a torso. Grated coarse carbon on it and spray fixed many times then cut with razor and drew on details.

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spending way too much time on my phone looking like this

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More Covid introspection. Here using a pad of layout paper and graphic ink pens I found in my uncle’s flat to draw myself from memory and overlay them with some self-portraits I did in the dark. In those I had a beard. In the later ones, not.

I started as usual by eyeing up bits of leftover tape. At first I saw two leviathans but combined them to make a kind of wishbone that looked like legs. Thus was Stickman born. A beautiful, fragile being with no soul other than that fragment of mine which I chose to give him. I made a film of me trying to get him to stand.

Its about how we anthropomorphise matter, are able to somehow pity it and how this is reflected in creation myth.

But it’s also about The Shadow, that we disregard but which is always there. as real, if not more real, than the object that receives all the light.

And about how I am using and reusing materials as the equivalent of the work itself.

Tapeman dies.

Tapeman is reborn – ever-living, ever-dying