Artist Statement:
I work with a camera, yet much of what I make with my camera is produced in the traditions of painting and creative printmaking as much as in photography. The camera becomes a tool, like a pen.
So my printed images slip between the descriptive and the abstract. What I show is not always obvious at first sight, or even second sight. My principal ambition is to create a visual effect that might move the viewer's emotions, as they might be moved by music or words. And then, perhaps, to provoke thought and questions in the viewer, about their relationship with the world around therm.
Much of what I produce as an artist is a response to the flowing narratives of nature, an encounter with the wealth of languages that nature has developed that tell us its stories. Like all artists, I show surfaces, but I wish to imply the structures, movements and relationships that lie beneath these surfaces. What do they tell us of how the universe is made, what holds it together, what pulls it apart?
A key theme that runs through my work is FLOW ... a process so fundamental that I cannot imagine anything existing without it. And FLOW is more than an essential process, it can be a philosophy, a way of living:
The Chinese sage, Lao Tsu, talked of this 2,500 years ago: "Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. Yet water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is a paradox: what is soft is strong."
Education:
My ways of seeing the world have inevitably been influenced by the many years I have spent travelling the globe as a filmmaker. Making work in some 80 countries I have learnt to appreciate the pleasures of difference while becoming convinced that what connects us is infinitely greater than what divides us.
This privileged experience has given me a wide frame of cultural reference. It has enabled me to talk with, and often to create work together with, people of great distinction and achievement. Yet I have also shared the experiences of people who have less than nothing, whose lives have been exploded by conflict or injustice. They too have taught me much.
Professional/Teaching Experience:
As well as making my own artwork I have made films for international distribution featuring visual artists as diverse as Rembrandt and Jean Michel Basquiat, Giotto and Joseph Beuys, Michael Nelson Tjakamarra and Anselm Kiefer, Anthony Gormley and Cindy Sherman. I have also made films with and/or about the writers Edward Said, Arthur Miller, Salman Rushdie and John McCarthy; the musicians Simon Rattle and David Byrne; the dancer/choreographers Merce Cunningham, Siobhan Davies, Bill T Jones and Tamasaburo; and the environmentalist/entrepreneur Tim Smit.
History, politics, belief and ideas run as continuous strands through my work as a filmmaker, but so too do the sensuous and emotional. And they are deeply embedded in my artworks.
I have written and broadcast on art, and curation is an essential complement to my work as an artist.
Exhibitions:
Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include:
UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA - an ambitious series of exhibitions and events in which I am both curating and exhibiting, at various venues across the world heritage city of Bath, throughout 2016; LOVE & DEATH @ Walcot Chapel, FaB15 Festival, Bath (artist and curator); STILL, 44AD, Bath; DECK THE WALLS, 44AD Bath; FESTIVE, Andelli Arts, Wells; ART OF NATURE 3, Balaji Temple, Birmingham; EIGHTH WONDER, 44AD, Bath; FOREST OF IMAGINATION, 44AD Bath; TIMESLIP, FaB14 Festival, Bath; WINDSCAPES 2, Dorchester County Hospital, Dorset; TRANSFORMATIONS, PhotoPlace, Middlebury, Vermont; VINIS VINIFERA, Dalston, London; CREEKSIDE OPEN, APT Gallery, Deptford, London; TM13, Real Fonderia Gallery, Palermo, Sicily; LYME OPEN 2013, Malthouse Gallery, Lyme Regis, Dorset (Prizewinner); SCOPE, Miami, Florida; Colletiva 1, Garage Bonci, Pietrasanta, Tuscany; WINDSCAPES, Immersive video presentation for Cultural Olympiad, ICCI 360 degree Arena, Olympic sailing venue, Weymouth, Dorset.
Film presentations and talks include: ICA, National Gallery, Tate and NFT, London - Modern Art Oxford - Ikon, Birmingham - Orchard, Edinburgh and others across UK - MoMA, Metropolitan, Whitney and Broadcasting Museums, New York - Pompidou Centre, Paris - National Gallery, Sydney.
Artistic Influences:
Too many to count, but some to whom I feel closest: Giovanni Bellini, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Turner, Corot, Monet, Bonnard, O'Keefe, Rothko, Martin, Beuys, Bourgeois, Richter, Long, Kiefer, Basquiat
Artist Tags:
flow, nature, prints, camera, emotion, ideas
