Day 52 and the weather has turned foggy again, it was to be expected as soon as I said I may go up the mountain today. Anyway it’s probably for the best as I have a serious amount of work that I need to get done at the moment. I have just finished stretching the canvases on the fourth of my diptych stretchers, so I now have a column of them,  6 feet tall, (183cm). Working on them has been really useful, not just because of their production but because it has allowed me to get close to them, to think more and more about what they are and how they relate to my other works and how they relate to the spaces where they will be shown. The nature of these objects is always very fluid in my mind, they are very definitely sculptures at the moment, but that could change again because the references and the reliance on the heritage of painting remains a very important part of them. So am I now an “artist that sculpts paintings”? Not that it really matters, they are what they are. No that isn’t true, the allusions to art, painting, sculpture and their exposition within the gallery space are far to strong in these works to say that it is unimportant. I will have to give this more thought; as I said my thinking remains fluid on this.

The experience of the art object and the explication of its existence, how that affects and possibly changes the observers perception, these are all areas which have been inherent in much, if not all, of my work over the last few years, but although they have been present, because of the nature of my working practise, they are maybe not areas that I have given enough thought to recently. These thoughts and ideas tie-in rather well with the portfolio piece which I am showing today. Reality Plus One, was a piece which operated very much in this area, like the Colour Series, (Red, Yellow, Green etc.), before it. It was a piece that needed participation, the observer had to become involved with the piece. Although it was approached from “the back of the painting”, like many of the earlier pieces, this one had a very clear mandate in the way that it invited the observer to enter “its” space and interact with it. I think that I now use similar qualities in my work, where as my work enters the gallery space and interacts with that and its users. It all seems to tie together, it’s all a work in progress.