An Alternative Statement:

I have statements. They are reasonably engaging. But each is its own part of the elephant’s skin. I’m not sure they help anyone understand my art better. To confine art in linguistic tethers is self-defeating – like quantum physics, the act of measurement then determines the nature of the thing, and all its glorious complexity and uncertainty is collapsed.

I have waffled on in artist statements about constructed and fractured reality, trying to pin down some very personal obsessions that leak all over my work. A visceral understanding of how, within the “objective”, we might find the subjective lurking in disguise, is a corollary of imprisonment within a cognition that apprehends the world differently. When such ideas were dragged into the sun (oh joyful culture wars!), my concerns travelled from esoteric to post-modern banality without passing go.

But this allowed me to grow and arrive at a level of new and uncomfortable complexity. I felt brutalised by witnessing real-world consequences that proceeded from these ideas, and their capacity to inspire the good to do not-so-good: “A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong” (Arendt). So, I find myself advocating for the imperative that our narratives must at least try to track reality (‘epistemic responsibility’), because it strikes me as being at the heart of what it is to be ethical.

As I grow in wisdom, I realise I exist torn between an experiential understanding of consciousness as a solipsistic silo, and the wiser urgent knowledge that we must strive towards a bridge to the world and others, even if it is futile. If there is no transcendence, no universal, then there is nothing. I believe art is something to do with transcending these silos, affording us a precious glimpse of what lies beyond the confines of cognition, narrative, and identity. My life is poised in this place of irreconcilability, which causes me some anguish. So, I try to render it in the world.  

There is an irony that my perception differs more than ever from the rest of the cultural sector. My sense is that the art world is monoculturally rooted in one pole of a polarised culture, and doesn’t strive with good faith towards embracing the pluralism of the whole. It is not that I am on ‘the other side/pole’, but that I gently maintain this conceptual framework is bad for humanity, as well as bad for art. Toe-ing something close to the prescribed line would no doubt offer a middle-aged, self-taught, disabled ‘outsider’ better prospects. But that would render my work meaningless. So, navigating the artworld can itself be a sort of test of integrity.

I’m not sure any of that will help you to understand my work. But it might give you a sense of who I am. I can say about my work, now, that it has an unwavering commitment to honesty, authenticity, and to genuine truth-seeking. It does not seek to flatten complexity, nor finger-wag. It is whistle-blowing rather than tribal. It takes the small particulars, but is about the largest universals. But, like my face, and my ideas, it doesn’t seem to quite fit in this world.

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