Who I am
Reading used to be for work, now it is for pleasure. Poetry and philosophy slide under everything my idiot brain dreams up while I am making art. I have lived on wit and imagination all my life, and when making visual art, writing poetry and playing music I am in my element. I like arbitrary starting points, improvisation, wordplay, collage, layering, overpainting, and struggling to make something coherent from a jumble of images or words or sounds. Most of all I like the surprise when meaning emerges … the uncertainty and uncensored quality of it thrill me.
How I got here
Post-war rationing ended the year I was born. I started drawing three or four years later. When I was six a friend and I went on strike at school – we were bored. I learnt my lesson and never got bored again. I tried writing poetry when I was 12, that year I also gave up the violin and got a guitar. I have been improvising with words and sounds ever since. After grammar school I studied art and design in Scarborough and Leeds. In Leeds I helped start up the Leeds Musicians Collective, producing publicity material and doing a little free improvisation on recorders and guitar. I also did some performance art and one year got money out of the Yorkshire Arts Association for a project. I moved to London in 1979 and worked for National Savings and then the
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. My last job there was helping catalogue the NMM oil paintings collection. That experience got me a lectureship in museum design at University of Lincoln (formerly Humberside College of Higher Education). Mid-career I completed a PhD at Hull University. I moved to Lincoln in 2002 with the School of Architecture and continued teaching museum and exhibition design until I retired in 2014.
Where I am going
I have been to China and to Australia … a whole month in each, and wow, the sites I have walked and touched, the sights I have seen. I have also seen a few bits of Europe, usually on city-breaks and great train journeys. In person I have seen enough to know who I am and where I need to be. I have travelled, but the truth is I prefer being moved without travelling. That is why I built a studio in my back garden. That is where I am going … to explore worlds without and within.
Click images for slideshow…
