As I walk past someone my age, with their near-teenage offspring, I am thrown into a state of hasty self-evaluation. Before I know it I’m putting together emotional scaffolding from whatever I can recall – a random song I wrote 17 years ago, ot an obscure blog where I said something I thought was smart.

We probably live out most of our lives through a normative lense. And in such atmospheres I find that self-pity becomes the lesser evil: far less painful to seek pity than being humiliated by naming achievements that blow away like a bone dry sandcastle in a gale force wind.

Nothing much that is eventful has happened in my life that feels like a rite of passage.

Yet this evening, I had a moment that warmed my heart.

Almost exactly 18 years ago I experienced one of the happiest times of my life: I had an artistic rite of passage.

I had a creative and stylistic breakthrough in the dying weeks on 2006 that ensured that I would continue making work right up until the present.

In a make-shift university satellite building in my home town I finally found “it” (if that makes sense), with a large piece of paper, a few biros and a CD burn of Kraftwerk’s The Man Machine.

My tutor Morris merely suggested going big scale. My close friend Lee burnt me nearly all my music, this time it was Kraftwerk. My other art tutor Garry Sykes was always planting creative seeds, in a way that you only realise a long time after. As a big Kraftwerk fan, he walked into our studio, which no other student was using at that point, and looked incredibly pleased at my breakthrough.

Sadly, Garry passed away this year.

In just over a year I have an opportunity to exhibit in a gallery literally 50 metres from the student art space where this happened. I wish he was here to witness it.

After all that has gone off personally in recent years, I now see this as my next artistic rite of passage.

Of late, after years of self sabotage and fuck ups, I looked at my recent progress, and tentatively surmised that something new is afoot. Admittedly I was using the same kind of pens and paper and listening to the same album.

My work has often been construed as merely negative. In the past this hurt. Let me explain why.

I don’t even know how to explain how I’m an artist, or if I even ‘like’ art,per se. All I know is that I’m compelled to keep doing it.

For me, it is inseparable from a revolutionary spirit.

It’s a continual conversation with a world that won’t respond and won’t accept it’s lack..in turn I must create that lack

In this present tense endless publicity, production and engagement are seen at the only artistic modes. Yet I became an artist through negation.

Negation is an overly philosophical word that I use with fear that I don’t even understand it. But what I mean is that art allows me to refuse, period – in a way that nothing else in life has ever allowed.

I am at my most creative in such moments.

Long may it continue

Thanks