What’s your favorite cartoon?

I’m going to say Earthworm Jim

I used to get up on school holidays in the UK in 1996 and watch it religiously.

What I remember most fondly is it’s almost Monty Python-esq surrealism. most notably when the theme tune just randomly stopped, and we saw Jim snoring on a hammock, until he swallowed and choked on a randomly butterfly!

Artistic rites of passage

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

New line of prints

Really happy to share that I’ve now got these limited edition signed A1 prints for sale. They do great justice to two of my most cherished works. I am doing an edition of just 7 of each – I prefer odd numbers. They are £55 (including p&p) each. Comment or DM me if you’re interested 🙂

Feel somewhat weird for promoting work on Black Friday. I spent my 20’s reading Adbusters, for which Black Friday was #buynothingday. The marketing of work remains a moral maze, but these are two of my favourite works, and would love other people to be able to appreciate the.

Thanks and have a good day.

What will your life be like in three years?

When I was a few months off being 18, 9/11 happened. Since that point (with the exception of a few points in the 2010s where I thought the tide was turning towards a better world), I’ve admittedly worried about the future around me being worse, and this has impacted my sense of being able to live well in the present.

Now I wish I’d had not felt so many years that weren’t actually so horrible compared with the present feeling like something horrible was about to happen.

In 3 years I just hope that I able to reward myself with respect and care no matter what life on the planet looks like.

What major historical events do you remember?

9/11. I mean, who doesn’t?

But, being as I was soon to be 18, a symbolic marker point from transition from childhood to adulthood, 9/11 became that marker point.

Everything before seemed secure. If not rose-tinted, then at least buffeted by a secure horizon of endless ok-ness in a western consumer bubble.

Nobody can yet explain how 9/11 felt except by using the John Carpenter film title ‘in the mouth of madness’.  The outside and Inside, the real and unreal collided in a way that made an entire coming generation want to run away into nostalgia and nihilism.

It wasn’t the worst thing to ever happen to anyone, but it marked a point of no return: from the anticipatory culture of an analogue mass media culture waiting for a millennium to a desensitised “always on” (and always watching) culture of no more surprises or mystery.

Worse things have happened since, not least in the past 2 years, but nothing will alter a culture quite as bluntly as 9/11.

Saying goodbye to old works

I guess interpreting a work of art is still one of the few spaces in contemporary life where we are forced to confront the void of comprehension that exists between ourselves and the Other.

As much as Social Media is encouraging ‘creatives’ to be production lines for our own identity, which is built upon an history of art valuation based on the power of certain voices, nobody can really fully deconstruct all art and artists into mere equivalents in a market-based, or any other system.

It might be the case that I am never remembered or revered for the work I have produced. It may remain what Gregory Sholette calls ‘dark matter’, part of the mass of creative produce that lay hidden in plain sight.

But none of this can lessen my, or any other artist’s life-long devotion to what they do, whether it translates as a professional practice in our business-dominated lexicon, or remains perceived as an intense hobby.

‘A Final Acceptance’, with all original sculptural elements, in the Tide of Society show, 2010.

This is why it is kind of sad to drag this most hefty of works out of my parents’ shed to take some final photographs before demolishing it. Because, in the framing of artistic productivity, it’s just one random work of middling standards in the body of work I’ve made.

But, like myself with the works of others, you can only see the tip of the iceberg.

I cannot demand peoples’ attention enough, nor should I, to articulate a year long back-story; how the work was my most articulate display of mental illness to date, how it was the focal work for an entire exhibition project that took up an entire, and how it was the last sculptural-painting work I made before I had to realise I neither had the space of resources to produce such works. Alas, this was also a work that crossed the New Labour to Conservative Austerity years, and crossed a sea change from the unbridled productivity of my early 20s to the heavier creativity of my late 20s and 30s.

The work was made from literally all sorts, and something has caused it to decay , maybe from a mixture of mould and oxidisation, or something. Equally, every time the work gets moved, another bit of the sculptural aspect gets smashed. It wasn’t, and still isn’t the kind of work I could ever afford to look after properly.

But it’s nice to take some photos to say one last goodbye to it.