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Paperweight - a small solid object heavy enough, when placed on top of papers, to keep them from blowing away in a breeze or from moving under the strokes of a painting brush.
These works represent internal thoughts and feelings about the environment. They possess a metaphorical weightiness, paper + weight, mimics bound by abstraction and anchored in landscape, relics at once found and abandoned. They are an inertial motion, like an emergent swell on sea water that simultaneously appears and recedes away. Layers and glazes evoke a murky, swampy miasma.
There is commitment to abstract Colour Field painting; all over painting defines the background environment, the various folds and structures operate as the foreground allowing the work to inhabit a space between painting and sculpture. Against the wall groups of green group together to form a horizon. Up high is the sky or clouds at least, down below the darker chambers of Earth.
The relative simplicity of the work came from a desire for clarity; the hidden layers that have been worked on top of, covering and recovering past actions contradicts simplicity and a duality that mirrors how I feel about the world (one rife with hypocracy, contradictions, and cover-ups).
I've been making paintings on and sometimes out of paper for a while. As a material it can hold so much unexpected weight. It transforms into sculpture quite easily, or can appear flat and undisturbed, and hides it's history quite elegantly. In some ways it is already a perfect sculpture.
As a vehicle for paint it has its limits, but working within those is gratifying, especially when engaging with its flatness on small scales. More fun than canvas, less faff, and less heavy.
I feel I have a lot of freedom working this way. I try and imbue these small works with a sense of the unfathomable, moments and memories and aches and pains rendered as physically disrupted colour fields. What is the colour of fog? The haze of air pollution? How would colour field artists engage with current environmental concerns? Have they changed at all?
Maybe this is speculative abstraction.
Many years ago I started working on much heavier material than canvas: sheets of steel, 4-foot wide. Occasionally I cut and remade them into sculptures. My working style adapted but now I work mostly on paper rather than metal. The reasons for this are numerous, but amongst the most important is convenience of space. My practice has also been shrinking in scale. I've started working smaller and I wonder if these paintings are beginning to find their material limits.
There is a back and forth in my practice between the relative flatness of the plane and finding ways to subvert it. It is about to take a turn, away from perceiving landscape, ontologically speaking, as a distant object held within non-representational planes and instead towards something more closely connected to experience.
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