(Street Interventions, Milton Keynes and beyond, 2013 – ongoing) paper
My street interventions began in my early practice, many are from long before I professionalised. I started where I live in Milton Keynes, but over the years I’ve done them all over e.g., in rural locations, such as Iceland, in a stately home (Doddington Hall), and in other towns, like Cambridge. Nine prints of these interventions were shown at Venice International Experimental Art Festival in 2016/2017.
They’re made from book pages – the beginnings my recurring exploration of uncertainty about the nature of reality and its relationship with narrative.
One curator described my street interventions as “a small subversive act”, and I rather liked that. Like much of my work, they’re quite self-defeating – there’s a lot of up-front production to make something materially ephemeral, to change a space for a mere moment in time.
Although initially made quite compulsively, and without knowing why, as I reflect on my own practice over the years, I understand those paradoxical aspects of the process as being related to futility and absurdity from the experience of disability. However, the nature of the object itself is an attempt to elicit in others a different way to feel and experience space, in a more primal, visceral, immediate way. That part is a communication.
I started out making them from old copies of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. It was a bit tongue-in-cheek: because I struggle with language and information processing, the book was useless to me in the conventional sense (and it’s obviously completely anachronistic now – young people would have no idea what that is!). So instead, I built my actual art from it – it was like a kind of bad joke. And that bad joke is a continuing riff throughout my work, because I make so much work from paper with text, and it’s always this obviously doomed attempt to bridge the gap between language and reality, endlessly failing to reconcile the irreconcilable.
More detail:
In my 30s, I started compulsively making things out of paper – book pages specifically – and placing these little offerings, interventions, on the streets in Milton Keynes, mostly in underpasses, also on street furniture. I’ve always been a bit obsessed with the underpasses in Milton Keynes – something to do with the crossing of ways and being submerged – there’s something rather mystical about them – so that was the original canvas.
This was before I was really calling or thinking of myself an artist. To offer some context, by this time, I’d given up trying to work even part-time after a succession of breakdowns. I was trying to live on long-term disability benefits, and fairly frustrated.
One of the big underlying themes of my work is about the gap between reality and language – and that is very connected to autism, I think. This work, and my subsequent work with text as a paper object is about this, really.
The way I experience my own thoughts and intellect – it’s very dense and abstract, yet at the same time somehow really physically rooted and intuitive and emotional. I don’t understand rationality and emotion to be at opposing ends of an axis. Thinking is feeling for me. So, I strive to try to bring them together for others. There’s definitely a yearning, for me, to try to communicate on a deep and authentic level, somewhere in a place beyond language.
I always say that I’m trying to make people *feel* their thoughts – so, trying to bring them down from a kind of white-noise place of forebrain and language into a deeper primal place of sensory experience, and even into what you might conceive of as a heart space of universalism.
In general, in my work I don’t need for people to grasp the concepts that I’m trying to explore – but I do want to elicit in them the emotion, or some sort of visceral sense, of that concept. An aspect of all of my work, really, is an attempt to make very abstract, quite intellectual, things immediate and embodied and emotional.
