Small works, Camden

Text to accompany a 2025 Open studio at Koppel Lock, Camden

Small combinations (main walls)

This collection of small works has been developed over these last few months in this studio and the works particularly draw on my relationship with this area and this studio, as well as on my longer term themes of parenthood and relationships, and our sense of place and belonging. Where do these connections come from and how are they maintained or lost?

The process of collecting materials occurs fairly instinctively and mainly as I travel from home to my studio or explore the area around my studio. For me there are parallels here with many parenting related moments and which range from the mundane to the intensely emotional. The processes of tidying up, sorting out, clearing out, holding on or passing on. In this way too, mixed in with the found items there are also small personal items, or for some, perhaps it would be better to say, small things from the home. Again, the lost, found, discarded, broken or one time kept but now forgotten.

I collect these materials with a sense of curiosity and discovery, both in the objects themselves and also in the resonance, or perhaps the echoes of a resonance, of some of these things. Using materials from the areas I live and work in is also important as it connects me to a place in time. Camden is an area I lived and worked in some years ago and working in this way also allows me to explore anew and consider past connections.

The process of making arises out of exploring the materials found. I like to work through the materials collected around the time they are collected. I do not have much of a store of various things. Most things are used up quickly. There are a few bits and materials that linger, but stuff mostly finds its way into a combination within days, sometimes even the same day. This also lends a sense of time to the outcomes, as they capture what was found when and what then happened.

Sometimes there is the nub of idea that I will start with, like, I will think about how I could get these two pieces of broken pencil back together again and then combined with this other thing to maybe secure it. The first acts of starting this then give rise to the next, which then needs another action and so on. Each action comes to the next and any original idea invariably gets lost in amongst what follows. There will be various moments of failure bound up in any final combination. Things break, or fall away, or an idea for how some things might combine or fix will simply not work. In this way a combination can suddenly move off in a totally new direction, or even cease to emerge altogether. The process tends to end once there is a sense of a complete combination. Any sense of another action being needed to somehow conclude or compound or extend the proceeding actions is gone. Whatever the idea was or has become is done. Or there are no more materials of course.

The Tools For Something Out of Reach (end wall) started out of such a failure. One or two were attempts are trying to hold something up higher. It was a complete failure and I was left with these extended combinations with peculiarly specific endings, and I was intrigued by this sense of purpose but for what ? Since then I’ve found that certain sets of materials and combinations just end up pointing in a similar direction and this then becomes the direction of the making.