(sculpture, 2011) inkjet print on copy paper
It tickles me to include this slightly unprepossessing paper sculpture, but it was a kind of significant moment for me in that, retrospectively, I think it is my pivot from being a photographer, or purely a photographer, to perhaps being an artist.
The photographic collective I was in was asked to respond to Gerard Byrne’s work at MK Gallery in 2011. It was decided (for reasons lost in the mists of time) that we would pivot our responses around a random page from a vintage magazine called ‘True Story’.
It was a photography exhibition; I made a paper sculpture. (So it begins…). As you can imagine, the other photographers thought I was a massive wanker. And I thought, ‘maybe I’m possibly an artist?’. (I think both are probably true.)
I used scanning as the photographic process, treating the text as an object, and abstracting its content by iterations of scanning until it was unintelligible. This I transformed into a sculpture – far removed from its original incarnation as a body of information-bearing content. I contended the object was a photograph. (The beginnings of working with paper, obsessively turning two dimensions into three dimensions, can be seen here…)
The work mirrored the concerns that figured in Gerard Byrne’s work exploring the interface between myth and reality. I was expressing my own uncertainty about the nature of reality and its relationship with narrative.
There is an anxiety that perhaps we construct objects from how we label them, that identity is created by the act of identifying, that reality itself is begotten merely from the acts of perception and cognition. This is a natural concern for someone who lives in a parallel reality because of cognitive differences.
And yet now there is a new huge anxiety, in antithesis, which emerges with a more recent grasp of quite how dangerous that conviction can be – when narrative is gutted of referent, and our theories of the world shift fundamentally from materialism (as my work now explores – see A Fall From Grace). The coal face of this irreconcilable tension informs a lot of the alienation and difficulty I experience.
