Interventions, London (2013 - 2019)
Foam Balls, 2013
These pictures are my very first attempts at making visual statements, small utterances that only exist briefly in front of a camera. They came about, not by accident but rather by a daily need to stretch my legs. At the time I took them I would work long hours by my desk on some paintings, often without moving very much. I would therefore at some point, often in the afternoon feel a need to go for a stroll around the neighbourhood of my studio. It is a pleasant area, but in those days to appreciate it often required a certain frame of mind. The whole area was rabidly being re-development, as the London Overground rail network was being built, resulting in so many old buildings around me suddenly standing empty, waiting for the wrecking ball.
On a whim I had one day bought a set of three foam balls from a newsagent. They were probably intended to be toys for small children or things with which to entertain ones dogs. I liked the squishy feel of them, the ease with which they would fit into a coat pocket. Armed with them in one and my small digital camera in the other pocket I began venturing out, exploring well-known places with a fresh, new purpose.
I have often thought of the placements I did with these foam balls as adjustments, insertions that explained to myself why this or that scene made me stop and hesitate for a moment. What I did, I guess was pretending the visual word around me was a text and could be treated accordingly: a kind of draft document where I had the right to use a white correction fluid or a fluorescent highlighter to point out and alter what was being said. Placing my spongy toys offered me the opportunity to write notes in the margins of reality, wishing it would one day take notice to what I said. I was for a brief moment, if not a writer then an editor of the novel my life was set in.
One of the last pictures I took in this batch of photographs was of all three foam balls grouped together in a small park, covered with snow. Their colour scheme- red, yellow and blue- seen against an expanse of white made me think of the Dutch constructivists, Piet Mondrian in particular. I had passed his flat in Hampstead a few times (it has a round, blue plaque) and it was as if he too had decided to stretch his legs and come along, just for the fun of it. The image was certainly an acknowledgement of his presents but also a mark of celebration: a way of remembering one of those brief, joyous moments where endless promises lie in front of you.
Apart for an appearance as a composite print, showing six of the photographs this project has not previously been made public.
Painted Props, Hampstead Heath London, 2015
Painted Props is a collection of two pieces: a painting in three parts, a triptych of sorts and a series of four drawn out objects, painted and given a joint identity by a shared pallet. The two sets were prepared in my workshop using sawn lengths of timber as the support for their colour scheme. They have been photographed on walks in the large, open woodland that forms part of Hampstead Heath in North London. It is area where generations of artists have previously roamed and studied nature, made observations that sometimes have translated into memorable works of art. It was once the closest one could get to an open landscape within easy access from the city’s centre. Today this sense of untouched nature is mostly an illusion; a manufactured avoidance of reality even if it, as such things go is a rather pleasing deception.
The two pieces are performances of sorts, short-lived visual statements aimed at an audience, even if it in this case is often no more than the person taking the picture. I think of my painted timber pieces as measuring rods: instruments for gauging the weather, each separate location and my own shifting moods. I do not attempt determine any of these options individually, but are choosing all three of them together as one. I have from time to time considered what to do with these images, how to let them leap into the reality of other peoples lives. I guess where you see them, on a webpage is as far as have ever felt tempted to jump. I hope something about them stirs or even awakes you to the painterly possibilities in familiar landscapes.
Disposed Pennies, Copenhagen 2016
Hello, do you have a moment?
The four images you will find in the ladies and gents’ restrooms are from a series I have recently completed: “Disposed Pennies”. They record a number of interventions, small pranks I planned and carried out using a length of sawn, 8 x 2 inch timber painted in light pastel colors. The location I picked for my shenanigans is the external walls and the pavement surrounding the Bank of England in the City of London.
Quite often I chose weekends for my picture taking, to get some peace and quiet. When leaving the site, however, regardless of the day I did often feel that someone had been watching me. That was probably true: not because what I did could appear to be antisocial – the behavior of an unruly youngster – but rather it had to do with the nature of my chosen location. Apart from its architectural merits, this place clearly contains assets in need of guarding, far easier to count and to measure than in the field of aesthetics.
The bright ovals – shaped as elongated coins – the penny-sized dots, and the sawn timber are all what they appear to be, as are the walls and pavement around the bank. But as I bring the two elements together and they get acquainted, a third component, the request for meaning turns up and tugs at your sleeves. “What is this all about?”
My response is quite simple, even if it may not feel like a fully-fledged answer. What you have is a prompted conversation, between a painted object and a backdrop – a figure and a ground, observed and captured by photographic means and hence now bonded in a new, private space of their own. Without the object, the environment would lack both focus and depth; without the setting, the painted length of timber could be both inarticulate and pointless.
There is a story I heard as a student, of the painter Robert Rauschenberg making his way up to his studio early one morning. At the top of the stairs a fellow artist, Jasper Johns, greets him with the words “Did you see the light on the steps of the staircase?” to which Rauschenberg answered “Sure!” “That’s all good, but did you observe it?” was Johns’ reply. With that anecdote in mind, I hope any uncertainty about what may be my own intentions has been settled.
Finally, we often take for granted that electronic information, like the pixels that make up these images, can be transferred without loss. We assume that, even when they have travelled from distant places, there really has been no loss in translation.
But the meaning of a term, like “to spend a penny”, may well have vanished, perished on its way across the North Sea from London. It means going to the loo, to a public toilet that is. Such a visit once required a penny coin. To gain access to a cubicle you inserted it into a mechanism on the door and then turned a small lever. As you may already have guessed, you never saw that coin again.
Now, have you washed your hands?
The above text accompanied the photographic project: Disposed Pennies (2016) that was shown at ‘The Toilet’, an provisional gallery situated within the restrooms belonging to ‘Din Nye Ven’, a bar and restaurant in central Copenhagen. The exhibition was reproduced in full, including the above text in the online magazine Art Kopenhagen, in late August 2016. The publication alas no longer exist.
Dyed Rags, Hackney 2019
The images you will find in this folder were taken in a small garden, tucked away between tall buildings in Hackney, east London. To call this space a garden may well be stating the nature of the setting too strongly, as all the ground surfaces had been covered with tarmac a long time ago. It is a place where no plant, with the exception of a few weeds has its roots in solid ground; and although the calendar read winter at the time I started taking my pictures, the frost had yet to set in.
What grows in a space like this are in pots and tubs, cracks in walls and on dust gathered over time in unused spaces. It is neither unkempt nor unloved: it’s a common area, a thoroughfare for which no one can claim any real ownership. So the love it receives is more like kindness, the sort you may show to someone you don’t know that well; a nod to ease the contact you cannot avoid when passing through to somewhere that matters to you.
My interest in this space came about slowly, starting with a curiosity that over time grew into something more earnest, the sort of curiosity that has resulted in the interventions you see in my pictures. These are small visual remarks, gestures with which I try to understand my own behaviour and acknowledge how I have noticed other people behave as well. Our attitude to places are imbedded in actions, the odd little ticks that can easily be missed, but should be simpler to understand once they have been pointed out and framed by a camera.
Each of my interventions has involved placing a few dyed rags, picked from a range I prepared in advance in my workshop. Every rag has been given its own hue, which was mixed with the landscape of the city in mind. I had ensured that each of them was spaced evenly from the others, before finally lightening the tone of all to set them apart from their surroundings. Each time I chose to place one of my cloth pieces, I did so because I had seen an opening where they would make a difference: create a comment and hopefully force you to contemplate, not necessarily to what I had done but to what was there in the first place.
I think my aim was to help out, to connect the random bits and pieces I encountered whenever I walked through this environment. They appear to lack any particular reason to be there and the garden itself is likewise missing a motive to act as their host. My goal was to offer them a break, a temporary sense of belonging in a rather shapeless setting. My rags are an bid to humour those lost objects, cajole them as if they were small children into accepting each other’s company and the place where they have been left and now have to learn how to fend for themselves.
A garden like this one is by nature never entirely natural, nor is it wholly man made place. It inhabits a sort of middle ground, a zone where it is difficult to know who’s in charge, which in its own way is a rather pleasing scenario. The cloth pieces are my way of prodding this state of affairs, adding or wiping away colour where it is needed to nudge this precocious situation into something a bit more stable. I rely on my photographs to offer a glimpse of structure or even permanence where none was to be found before; and should you share that feeling, then my efforts has possibly not been in vane.
This text was written as an introduction to the photographs above with a publication in mind, most likely a pamphlet with a small print run. A test was done, but the actual production never happened. What seemed like an opening, the right moment in time to let it go has since then passed.