I’m really not quite sure what I’m going to post on here today; I have been working mainly on the plans for my commission piece over the last day or so and which, sadly, I don’t yet feel in the right frame of mind to share with the world yet. It’s a very involved piece which will need a lot of planning, which is what I am doing now. When I get back from Ireland and into my studios in Manchester the construction phase will start which will involve about 4 months of work before the installation date, which hasn’t been finalised yet but will be due around about April/May 2012. Perhaps as things progress with it over the next few weeks I will feel happy to share some images.

So as I don’t have any new work which I can share which you today perhaps it is an appropriate time to start to introduce some of my older work and to put it into context. The piece above is now about 6 years old, but for me it will always have a lot of significance. It is called 1-2-1 and consists of eleven 10cm square paintings, each on a wooden block, and each with a hole drilled right in the centre of the back, which means they can be hung any way up. On the wall is set a square grid of 121 pins 11 cm apart, the paintings can then be hung on these in any number of different combinations and relationships.

This was where one of my overriding interests in the exposition of art began, not in a curatorial way but as a part of the piece itself. I have even now started to class this as my first installation piece. This new direction for my work wasn’t apparent to me at the time when I created this piece, but retrospectively speaking, I now recognise that the new way in which I chose to explicate my work has happened as a direct consequence of this piece.