This folder contains material produced while I was a student, first in Copenhagen then in London and is followed by the first, independent steps I took after leaving education. A few of the earliest pieces were shown at group shows, while fellow students, teachers and my camera on occasion became the only witnesses to what happened.

The first four images you see are in black/white and are amongst my first, tentative steps. As far as I can tell, with the hindsight only time can provide, they are examinations into how you assemble, frame and read objects.

The next pictures, all in colour records a single sculptural piece that I assembled in a small, dark room with heavily worn linoleum flooring belonging to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Over a long winter I observed and cultivated its patchy, uneven surface and from that slowly grew a work that sprouted its components, as were they a colony of mushrooms. I worked on it while attempting to connect disconnected pieces I had either scavenged on walks at beaches or made by hand in workshops. As I did so, the memory of the early civilizations that had inhabited the shores where I lived came to mind. What the inhabitants had left behind were often never outstanding statements, works of art or pieces of fine architecture, but refuse that they had thrown out by the kitchen doors where it accumulated and had become layered records of their lives: oyster shells, broken utensils and leftover bones. From this discarded material we have gained a link and learned to understand our ancestors.

The final and last work from Copenhagen is a still life, assembled of anonymous looking shapes cast in concrete. They do not offer action, but rather a moment to pause. On completion it was placed without any permission in a small passageway in Roskilde, a throughway frequented by people eager to go somewhere else. It was intended to offer a gauge to how it feels to be on the move, in transfer when so little provides a degree of what it can mean to stand still. Some years later I made a return visited, only to find the piece intact, remarkably untouched by the passing of time.

What followed next, at the Slade School of Fine Art in London is something altogether larger and more physical. It was a time to reflect and assert myself, without any need to justify and share the results to anyone outside of the school gate. The brief film, which I made at this period, can be accessed in its full length using the following link:
https://vimeo.com/110647684/38be488111?share=copy

It shows one of my few attempts at performance and was shot by a fellow student, Melanie Counsel at the beginning of my second and final year. The video is slightly out of focus, but I do not think it matters: it records the brief lifespan of a piece as it unfolds, makes a statement and then gently disappears, all accompanied by a wonderful tune played by the Tad Cameron orchestra and vocalised to by the singer Pearl Ray.

The year after I left education I had my first, comprehensive one-person show. It took place in Copenhagen, in a space dedicated to contemporary visual art operated by the Danish ministry of Culture and presented sculptures and drawings, some of them made in London. To see the show, please use the following link: https://overgaden.org/exhibitions/to-sekunder

What follows are some paintings I completed in a small workspace that I rented a little after the show. The photos were taken at home with the pictures standing on the floor stacked against a wall. They are works on canvas, which combines egg tempera and linocuts. In my eyes they appear pre-planned, as if prototypes for something that could be manufactured even if they clearly are made by hand: a kind of observers of other sorts of objects. They have existed only for an audience of one that is up till now.

Finally I have decided to keep three images from the previous version of my website and include them in this folder. They are from my first show in London which took place a little later, in 1993 at the Photographers Gallery and is still as good a place as any to understand what has come to follow. To provide a slightly rounder picture of what was in that show, I have decided to add some new material: an extract from a 16 part photo-collage that filled an entire wall (on a 4 by 4 grid) and a series of four tempera/ linocut/ photo collages that due to their size had to be placed on two walls opposite each other in a corridor.

Finally I have decided to keep three images from the previous version of my website and include them in this folder. They are from my first show in London which took place a little later, in 1993 at the Photographers Gallery and is still as good a place as any to understand what has come to follow. To provide a slightly rounder picture of what was in that show, I have decided to add some new material: four large collages merging photographs with linocuts and paint. Due to their size they had to be placed in a small corridor, two and two together facing each other, which probably eased their reading.

The brief review of the show, which I have scanned, is amongst a few that have touched me when I read it. It taught me something I did not know already about my practice and encouraged me to keep at my craft regardless of what else might happen.