About
I studied Fine Art at Hornsey College of Art (BA Hons, 1985), followed by a postgraduate teaching fellowship and artist-in-residence at Christ's Hospital School, West Sussex. I exhibited paintings in the 1980s and 1990s at the Serpentine Gallery, the Royal Academy, and the Contemporary Art Society, among others.
A spinal injury paused the painting in the mid-1990s. After surgery in 1999, I gradually resumed, shifting focus to photography from 2006.
The work now spans photography and AI-generated imagery. The recurring interests are humanism, architecture, history, science, and industry; how we perceive and remember the past, and the strangeness hidden in plain sight.
The Sixth Land
Enter the Sixth Land. Gouache on paper, 1991
The Sixth Land is the idea of a realm that is both familiar and unknown, a place reached only through a transformative journey.
On this journey, you realise that everything is different to how you remember it. You recall that somehow, everything has already happened, and everything has changed. This experience alters your perception, awakening a profound longing within your soul.
It's a vivid yet elusive memory. The Sixth Land is far away, but close by. It is across the sea, in the desert, inside a mountain and through a forest.
The name, ‘The Sixth Land,’ invented itself in a dream so vivid in its narrative clarity that it shaded my thoughts and emotions for a long time afterwards.
Over time, it became my shorthand for what is unusual, noteworthy, or overlooked, encapsulating the strangeness hidden in plain sight, the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary. As a city dweller, I find this realm both in my immediate surroundings and in distant places that capture my imagination.
It is what I am looking for when I go out with a camera. It was a dream I had as a young man, and now, decades later, I remain fascinated by what it might mean.
Photography
The photography follows where I am. Right now, that is south and east London, streets, trees, water, buildings - all these things accumulate history. The aim is to document what is already there rather than construct a scene, finding clarity and meaning in both the ordinary and the extraordinary.
Inexistent Realities
A parallel strand of work uses AI image generation as a starting point, processing the results to create a photographic aesthetic that hints at deeper meanings and hidden or subjective realities. The faults and visual errors of AI-generated images, the uncanny slickness, the too-smooth surfaces, are treated as possibilities for creative exploration rather than problems to be solved.
Archive
Paintings and drawings
The archive documents my painting and drawing work from the 1980s through to the mid-2000s.