Divine, 2014, Oil on Linen, 79 x 63cm, Yale Center for British Art.

Reflections from the studio

From the Body to the Word, from Water to Stone

Language always falls short, yet it gestures toward the presence I am attempting to encounter.

The paintings speak in ways beyond explanation.

They demand attention, not understanding.

Divine (2014) began with a figure.

Shadow first, then something like a body.

He held a divining rod, Y-shaped, trembling, listening to what lay hidden beneath the surface.

I thought of Poussin’s shepherds, leaning over a tomb, reading the inscription that reminded them of mortality.

Mine did not read.

Mine searched.

For water. For life. For a trace of something that persists.

The title, Divine, held a double resonance: sacred and pragmatic, prayer and survival intertwined.

It mattered that they could not be separated.

The figure was already half-ghost, already part of absence, yet searching for what remained.

Years later, the Steles (2021–22) arrived as if following an inevitable trajectory.

By then the figure had vanished.

Only slabs remained.

Tall. Narrow. Human-scaled, precarious.

Inscribed with skeletal words: GARDEN. UTOPIA. THINGS.

Each one a disappearance.

Each one a witness.

The multiplication of tombs reflects the proliferation of loss.

Loss is never singular anymore.

The surfaces resisted me.

I layered pigment until it cracked, until it scarred, until it seemed corroded by time itself.

Rust, ash, earthen browns — the colors of decay and endurance together.

The words emerged like fossils, language stripped to its bones.

They are not sentences. Not stories.

Only skeletal nouns, remnants of what once anchored meaning.

I think of the echo of others — of verticality and ruin, of absence and relic.

I feel Kiefer, Newman, Beuys, Burri, hovering at the edges of my vision.

But this work is not imitation.

It listens to the world we are losing, the fragile remnants of what slips away.

Extinction is not behind us. It moves through the present, imperceptible yet inexorable.

The Steles do not memorialize only what has passed; they anticipate what is disappearing even now.

Where Poussin gave memento mori, these works give memento futuri.

They insist that we remember what will vanish, what may never arrive.

Not consolation, not instruction, but recognition of absence in the midst of life.

Presence in these paintings is not something I impose.

It emerges from erosion, from material tension, from the vulnerability of surface and word.

The slabs are witnesses, objects in space, inscriptions that tremble under their own weight.

They do not resolve grief or the impossibility of endurance.

They insist on attention, on reflection, on the body standing before them.

Even ruins endure.

Even skeletal words hold trace.

Not permanence, not clarity, but resistance.

A word that persists, a surface that bears the mark of what was and what is slipping away.

If anything remains, it is this:

Presence in absence.

Trace in ruin.

The fragile insistence of something refusing to vanish completely.

And perhaps, for me, that is enough.

Low tide wandering – notes made during making, extracted from notebook

2021

Low tide wandering, 2019-2022, Oil and charcoal on Linen, twine, victorian clay pipe fragments, masking tape, shell, coin and north sea keel worm cast, 220 x 195 cm. Collection the artist

Stele (UTOPIA), 2021-2022, Oil on panel, 180 x 25 x 6cm. Collection the artist.

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Not simply an image but a surface of memory. The field of green is not just colour – it is matter, it is moss, it is the slow breathing of time. The material is layered, as if many hands, many histories, have left their stains upon it.

The cord, descending vertically, interrupts the expanse. It is an axis, a scar, a reminder that gravity always calls us back to earth. And tied upon it, the small fragments – clay pipe, knot, shell, coin, sea keel cast – humble things. This is important. The modest object, elevated here, speaks with greater truth than the polished symbol. It reminds us that the sacred is not distant, but hidden in the banal, the forgotten.

The painting resists seduction; it refuses beauty in the conventional sense. Its surface is worn, rough, like an old wall carrying the weight of centuries. The resistance is its power. It calls us not to look, but to contemplate.

It is meditation on matter and spirit, a dialogue between what is eternal and what is perishable. The cord binds them together and the green is the breath of life that holds all.

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A cord descends,

Bearing the weight of silence.

The stone remembers the mountain,

The knot remembers the hand.

Matter is not mute –

It prays in its own tongue.

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2022

Something that does not scream. That does not flatter. That does not sell itself. Already this is a beginning.

This green; endless plane – resists the world. It is not an image but a field, a residual field, a refusal. A slow, wounded surface, pressed into being by time, by hand by silence. Not the silence of peace, but the silence of exile.

The green carries weight: swamp, verdigris, moss on stone. It is the green of water that refuses to move, of tombs where names are long forgotten. Dense, mottled, scarred – it absorbs the gaze, devours detail, demands endurance. The paint is worked and reworked, rubbed, layered, scrapped. It has suffered something, and it is suffering, it breathes – quietly, almost against its will.

From the top descends a cord, fragile and taut. Gravity, not geometry, has drawn this line. It cuts the plane not as composition but as wound, a vertical incision through the endless green. Along it clings small forms – stones, shells, fragments from the earth – mute witnesses bound to the thread. They do not decorate; they testify. They hang like truths dredged from the soil, like remnants of a body.

At the edges, faint red traces reveal the boundary where the surface meets illusion, where the field admits its artifice. And yet the painting refuses spectacle, it does not play. It does not seduce, it waits, it endures. A vertical wound suspended in a field of green. A thread that connects and threatens to snap.

This is not painting as image but as liturgy. Not critique, but confession. A horizon with no promise a world tethered by detritus, a man hanging by a thread. Gravity becomes grace. Or grief. What remains is persistence, the fragile effort to hold the world together. Not beauty in a classical sense but beauty as endurance.

A refusal, a surface rotting beautifully.

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Monad head - notes

The surface isn’t painted, it is inhabited.

A place where moss and dust take the role of pigment.

The work proposes: painting is not an act but an accumulation.

A head, yes, or the memory of one,

but not a portrait.

It is not him or her

The title gives us “monad,” the indivisible unit.

Each monad a mirror of the universe.

Here, though, the monad is vulnerable, porous, decaying.

It denies perfection, insisting instead on entropy.

The line that encircles the form

faint, failing, uneven

is more gesture than contour.

It suggests the fragility of boundaries:

the head dissolves into earth,

the self dissolves into residue.

Oil, studio waste:

matter that refuses idealism.

The painting folds accident and dirt into meaning.

It asks whether waste can hold presence,

whether the discarded might carry more truth

than the perfected image.

The green stain, moss, algae

it is not colour in the painterly sense.

It is growth. A compost. A trace of life,

but a life that emerges from decay.

This is not a portrait.

Perhaps a seed.

It is the archaeology of portraiture.

A face pressed into soil,

like the afterimage of someone

who once leaned against the wall

and disappeared.

Painting, here, is not representation,

but a site of erosion.

Not beauty, but remainder.

Not presence, but persistence.

The monad head, indivisible,

and yet

crumbled, dirtied,

its indivisibility already undone.

And in this undoing,

its truth.

Monad head (t), 2021, Oil and studio waste on canvas on panel, 30 x 37.5 x 2.5 cm. Collection the artist

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