Is this a lopsided building on stilts or a rectangular creature lumbering across the painting?
The black rectangle was placed on the sky for no particular reason other than that the rectangle was close to hand. It then became whatever it is.
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At first sight this work looks like a dark ellipse painted onto a blue background. Closer inspection reveals that the ellipse is in fact made of fur and that it protrudes some distance from the flat blue surface.
The fur is dark and matt, making its texture quite hard to see without close inspection. As a result most casual observers don’t notice. A close inspection is however rewarded with the realisation of what is being looked at.
This work exhibits my interest in interpreting perception, illusion and expectations.
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Three hammers bound together with shoe laces. The hammers are different sizes, creating a dynamic visual effect and implying a differential power status between the hammers.
The fact that the hammers are bound together renders them useless as hammers, making them impotent. However, maybe they’re not bound together to reduce their power – maybe they are bound together to create unity. Maybe the price of unity is a reduction in individual power. But is the price of unit a reduction in group power?
The work is a study of power, restraint and impotence. It’s also a nice composition. The inspiration came in my studio when I placed one hammer directly on top of another one (By chance or deliberately? I don’t know).
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Three convex mirrors mounted behind paper maché painted with metallic acrylic.
The distorting and illusionistic effects of mirrors are a significant feature of a lot of my work. The mirrors in this piece are mirrors from bicycle rear-view mirrors.
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A sculpture composed of a pair of splayed handyman’s pliers and a painted plastercast of the inside of a coffee filter cone.
Pliers and other handyman’s tools such as hammers and spanners are recurrent features in some of my constructions.
The work is probably influenced by the Arte Povera movement, and the plastercast of the inside of the coffee filter may owe something to artists such as Rachel Whiteread (although I don’t think that she’s known for adding colour to her casts).
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Titled Number Two in a Series, this is part of a series of prints based on images of numbers drawn in Procreate on an iPad.
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This is an example of digital abstract art, created in Procreate on an iPad using an Apple Pencil.
The brushes in software such as Procreate and Adobe Fresco are getting better all the time, allowing for much more spontaneous and expressive work than was ever possible in the past. The expressiveness of the medium is now such that I think that the results can legitimately be classed as paintings rather than just digital art.
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An installation composed of three clothes racks forming a pyramid.
The pyramid of racks is this size purely because I only possess three clothes racks. Given a larger space and a larger number of racks the pyramid can be huge. You may notice in the photo that as well as a pausity of racks the low ceiling in the room mitigates against the construction of monumental artworks.
This is a typical example of a work that almost created itself (I thought of it while I was moving the racks so that I could dry my washing). I have often admired the interplay of the horizontal and diagonal lines in the racks while I was using them for their proper purpose, but it was only recently that the idea of stacking them occurred to me.
This work is probably partly inspired by the art movements of constructivism, dada and arte povera.
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A cluster of organic forms, possibly resembling aquatic lifeforms. The small indentations in the top of some of the cones adds to the organic effect. The worm-like appearance of the cones makes them a slightly disturbing.
The cones are hand-rolled clay.
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This is a dip pen and ink sketch of a sweet chestnut tree in the Dordogne region of France that I drew from life on quite a cold day.
There are numerous sweet chestnut trees in this part of France, as they were cultivated for their nuts, which I believe were a major part of the local diet.
The tree was very old with lots of dead branches. There were also lots of leaves, which I think may have been growing on relatively new branches that may have sprouted lower down the tree when the tree recovered from a trauma of some description (and which nearly killed it off). Behind the tree is a ramshackle hut which appeared to have almost become part of the tree.
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The sculpture is composed of one large globe with several smaller globes attached to it.
The use of a globe of the Earth in the sculpture reflects my interest in environmental issues and in creating environmental art. My concerns about environmentalism go back to the 1960s, when I was mainly concerned with threats to wildlife. Since then the list of environmental concerns has grown and now includes climate change, resource depletion, environmental degradation and other aspects of environmentalism.
One of several interpretations of the work is that it shows that on the one physical planet Earth there exist multiple cultural world-views.
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A depiction of the concept of a superorganism.
A superorganism is the name given to such things as colonies of insects in which the members of the colony act together so that the whole colony functions as though it is a single entity, and in which the individual members of the colony are probably not viable to survive alone.
In the image hundreds (or maybe thousands – I lost count) of ants swarm across a rock and form into the shape of a huge single ant.
The subject of the image reflects my interest in both art and science.
Below is a detail of the work to show the appearance of the individual ants close-up.
The image was created in Affinity Designer .
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A proposal for a mural applied directly to an art gallery wall.
I’ve been experimenting with subjects that are suitable for murals on gallery walls for several years.
The proposed mural is of a group of semiabstract figures with linked hands. The anatomy of the figures is ambiguous. Are the circular objects at the top of the figures their heads, or are those some form of decoration? Are the large white circles eyes, and are the various indentations mouths?
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This proposed mural is based on a cartoon about fleeing environmental catastrophe that I drew in about 1991.
The image depicts a Western family fleeing a ravaged land that is piled with the detritus of the consumer society. The family is fleeing in a builder’s skip or dumpster, which ironically is a symbol of consumerism in that skips can often be seen outside houses here in the UK while the owners of the houses have new kitchens installed to replace their perfectly good old kitchens. There are several skips in my street as I write this.
When I first drew the cartoon about thirty years ago the concept of fleeing environmental disaster by boat was a novel idea with little or no link to actual events in the real world. The journey in the cartoon was symbolic. Now in the 2020s everything has changed, with boats constantly crossing the Mediterranean Sea and the English Channel carrying migrants from countries that are affected by climate change and other environmental and social pressures.
It’s interesting that if the mural depicted in this photograph was a cartoon in a magazine it would be looked at for a couple of seconds at most and then passed over. Enlarged onto a gallery wall the image may attract attention for noticeably longer and would magically attain a higher status.
I’ve drawn environmental cartoons since the 1970s. My environmental cartoons have been published widely, including in publications such as the Guardian newspaper and the Critic magazine. A book of my environmental cartoons, When Humans Roamed the Earth, was published by WWF/Earthscan in 1992.
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This work is a an animation composed of overlapping identical grids of hexagons rotating relative to each other.
The piece works on a similar principal to Moiré patterns, however the results are made more complex by the inclusion of simple computer algorithms that make the patterns in the grids interact with each other so that, for instance, where black areas overlap each other they turn white.The work is a relatively fast and dynamic work from the series. Others are slower and more meditative.
The work is from a series that explores the generation of complexity from simplicity and is ultimately concerned with the visualisation of the basic underlying nature of the universe (which by its nature must be very simple) and the way that it gives rise to the immense complexity that we see around us.
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I’ve been creating environmental art in one form or another since about 1970. This work is a development of a previous work from the late 1980s.
The work is a sculpture showing how I feel the human race is treating the environment – by putting the planet into the rubbish bin.
The sculpture consists of a standard kitchen waste bin, lined internally with very matte black material and with a back-lit image of the earth at its base. The result is the illusion that by looking into the bin you are looking into outer space as though through a porthole in a spacecraft, with the earth floating in the distance. It’s surprisingly effective.
The kitchen waste bin was deliberately chosen as the reciprocal that contains the earth because of its banality, to emphasise how we are causing environmental damage by depleting the earth’s resources through mundane consumption.
A version of this work was shortlisted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2022 and was exhibited in my solo show at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Cornwall, the same year.
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A quick sketch of a man on stilts. He has a stilt fastened to each leg and is holding two further stilts.
I’ve been drawing people on stilts on and off for a long time. I think my first one was about fifty years ago.
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This work is a slow moving animation that repays close attention. At first you may think that the animation isn’t working, but after three or four seconds you will notice the changes that are occurring to the complex inner structure of the work.
It is composed of overlapping identical grids of hexagons rotating relative to each other.
Simple algorithms make the black and white areas on the grids interact with each other so that, for instance, where black areas overlap they turn white.
The work is deliberately slow to give it a meditative quality. Other works in the same series are faster and give a more dynamic effect.
The work is part of a series called In the Beginning that explores the generation of complex patterns from simple patterns or forms as a metaphor for the creation of complexity within the physical universe from what must by definition be extremely simple beginnings.
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An example of different artists thinking of the same idea independently.
My cartoon drawing is a joke about text-based art from a book of cartoons that I produced on the subject of contemporary art and humour in 2019 ( See here ).
The photograph is of a sculptural text-based work by Harrison and Wood that was exhibited at Frieze London in 2022.
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An artist’s impression of one of my Emergent Pattern artworks as it would appear displayed on an art gallery wall.
The work is composed of two identical grids of black lines that are one above the other and that are at an angle to each other. Where the lines on the two grids cross each other the black lines cancel out and are replaced by white. The result is that the overlapping grids create complex emergent patterns.
The generation of these patterns is in some ways analogous to the generation of Moiré patterns or fringes. They are much more complex than Moiré patterns however, as Moiré patterns are created by the simple overlaying of lines without the additional operation of modifying the areas where they overlap.
The artwork is inspired by my fascination with optics and optical effects and my interest in both art and science.
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