‘Not Just Playing: the mosaics’ is my current and ongoing project that focuses upon structural and particular forms of childhood and child development. For example, work includes exploration of childhood play, connectedness, integrity, transitions and movement. At the same time, I am also undertaking further mosaic experimentation and development by using recycled, painted, coloured and stained glass to develop my own distinct visual language.
For me, my work must be both emotionally expressive and conceptually rigorous. In this way I use mosaic, collage and printmaking to explore linked personal, conceptual and contemporary themes. These themes have included interdependent concerns such as changing masculinities, fatherhood, families, childhood, child poverty and seeking refuge. I am trying, in my own way, to chart the lives of children, fathers and families in a highly dynamic changing world.
These latter goals and interests are grounded in my own life experiences. In addition, they are grounded within healthcare practice, research and writing about child health, in particular, while living within working class communities for most of my life.
My art involves both craft and experimentation to constantly improve my insights and skills. Hence, it is very important, for me, to viscerally feel, with my hands, creative processes like mark making or drawing with glass. Using one method, however, like painting and cutting recycled glass, also often helps develop my other work such as tearing prepared papers for collage or monoprinting by hand.
My work explores contemporary tensions and relationships between the objective and the interpretative, between figurative and abstract representation, and between the individual and the structural. While I am inspired by traditional practices, for example Graeco-Roman mosaic, my concerns are largely Modern. Modernism, I believe, offers the creativity, dynamism and optimism necessary to understand and represent our experiences in a fast changing social context.
My work is also Modern, I believe, in that it is intended to be transformative. That is, I want to integrate compassion, social justice and equity within my work but also challenge the relativism, fatalism, individualism, digitalisation and commodification increasingly evident within in our wider culture in the UK.
