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About Tod | Gallery Work | Greenpeace | Commissions | Contact
I'm interested in a world over amplified and speeding up, the visual razzmatazz of a globalising culture, the delirium of excessive production and waste, the exponential curve of history, as we hover on the apex of the old civilisations trajectory.
My installations are concerned with the function of architectural space in its capacity to separate us from and order our perception of the world outside. I graphically reinforce a room's edges and junctions, introducing new frames and grid structures, to zone and hold the space, to make clear its presence as a container. On to this grid I hang a decorative language of infrastructural systems, and detritus, to bring inside the sprawling incomprehensible complexity of the modern industrialised world. I use litter and streamers for their ability to hold different meanings and associations depending on how they fly, fall and drape there way on to the framework of the room.
I'm also interested in the spaces of power and poverty in a mode of celebration and destruction. Exploring historic architectural and decorative languages, to make crude analogue game spaces, where the viewer can be seen as player.
My work is an amalgam of the histories, cultures, environments and jobs that have had the greatest impact on me.
I have always lived in london.
I was brought up in an old house.
My parents worked in the theatre with costume and scenery.
They expressed awe at the visual.
I wanted to be an astronaut.
I wanted to be a comic book artist.
> From this base the following......
The NASA space programs crystal images of technology, earth and debris.
The BBC series the world at war.
The toxic DIY jolt and urban romance of punk.
The concrete lunar landscapes of the first skateparks.
The calligraphic acrobatics of graffiti.
The unpoliced, mobile, organic organization of free festivals.
The individual and the crowd on demonstrations.
Experimental squat interiors.
The colour saturated optimism of rave culture.
The view from aeroplanes.
The film koyanisqatsi, for the perspective, scales and speeds of the big project.
Kubrick's Barry Lynden, the electrifying composition on the other planet of history.
The anfilade through time at the Geffrye Museum.
The counterpoint civilisation of spinning gravities, Baroque music.
The military nuclear unit at Greenpeace UK (poison weapons production).
The space hijacking of Greenpeace campaign strategy.
The claustrophobia, zoning and clunky movement of computer games.
The fusion of high tech systems, geology and tradition that is switzerland.
The centrifugal pull, the breakaway dissolve, in rococo plasterwork.
The calibrated telescopics and articulation of structural forces in baroque architecture.
And recently, the most powerful images I've ever seen were 200 year old prints, showing my walk to school as open pasture.