This installation is work on paper exhibited in the old cinema building yard, Montejaque, Spain. July-august 2017.

The space contextualises manual labour and the work of coal miners in my family, who repeated their monotonous, restricted movements in the deepest coal mine in Scotland: 610m below the surface.

THE WORK
The subject of my work is the process of making it, limitation, restriction and repetition. Restricting my materials and with a strict, mark-making action, I deliberately control the painfully slow progression of the surfaces. It is a twenty year investigation.

The mark is a horizontal line. The most direct I know.
The substrate is paper.
Binders are limited to oil and cold wax.
Materials are restricted to ivory black pigment, graphite and charcoal.
The physical process is the monotonous repetitive movement of making lines by bending over paper, laid flat, and drawing the line or moving my paint mixtures across the surface over and over, again and again.
The concept is gemination: ”No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” Heraclitus of Ephesus.

I invite the viewer to find nuances and explore, as I explore, the sameness and, in my eye, huge differences which unrelentingly have driven me for twenty years. This is my practice.

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SURFACE WORK Series 1 (2017-2021)