22nd August 2023. 

6.15am. 

I’m sitting at my mother’s kitchen table drinking coffee and vaping, surveying the photographs of my first drop cloth venture of the day. My mum’s house is two doors down from my very first home, a ground floor flat in a converted 18th century mansion on Post Street, that, much like myself, has led many lives over the years. I sat reading in her back garden yesterday afternoon watching a gang of lads erecting a scaffold around it, which presented an opportunity too good to miss. It meant a perfect storm conceptually for the growing body of work I’ve been producing in response to being issued the challenge of pursuing an itinerant residency for the duration of the yawning summer holidays. I guess I should mention at this point, that despite my advancing years, I’m currently doing an undergraduate degree in fine art at Nottingham Trent, and I don’t mind admitting loving it. I find myself in Godmanchester having come to mum’s a couple of weeks back to join the family celebration of her 70th birthday, it’s hard to get my head around my mum being 70 years old. It’s a reminder that I too, am certainly getting no younger. In a funny way I feel like I’m living my life backwards and I’m sure that’s leaving me feeling more youthful than I am, although my grandmother used to talk of having an optimum age and feeling like she was still 18 in her 80s. Catching sight of her reflection in shop windows and taking a second to twig who the old lady staring back was. My relationship with time is taking on a peculiar complexion, the further I get from the past, the closer it feels. This body of work, and this morning particularly have brought this concept into sharp focus.  

Being in south Cambridgeshire and having the opportunity to walk the many water meadows that flank the Great Ouse as it flows inexorably through East Anglia, out to Kings Lynn and the open salty expanse of The Wash and North Sea, has been a constant in my life. That, despite having been around the houses, my mum once again lives here, and I still get the opportunity to, is something I'm incredibly grateful for, especially so this summer. I adore time spent alone in the countryside, as a painter I often find myself thinking about Gainsborough, Constable and Turner and their relationship to the landscape. As I wandered around the water meadows between Godmanchester and the Hemmingfords yesterday I found myself thinking about John Constable a lot. I thought about how the landscape experiences time, how each of our lives is merely a blink of the geological eye, how the trees watch us come and go, wondering what they must make of our self-importance. Constable and Gainsborough were, of course, sons of Suffolk, the county adjacent to where I sit right now, the other side of a boundary that only carries meaning to humans. I thought about it being the same land, a land that has changed comparatively little in the 200 or so years that separate us. I looked up at the same sky they had both painted, the sky that marks the boundary between earth and the infinite from our puny human perspective. I wonder whether time starts to compress for every human being as they get older, if the past comes rushing up in a great wave set to consume us all. Had it not been for the scaffold going up outside 21 Post Street or “The Holme” as the house is called, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to reconnect with my own past so vividly. I spent the first five years of my life just on the other side of that wall, my memory says it was idyllic, what was my beginning was so many middles of other people’s experiences. 

As ever, I woke up early doors, got my shit together and headed into the street as the cold, weak light of breaking dawn was filling the air. Most of the few people about at 5am didn’t notice me or what I was doing as I clambered about on the scaffold like the 5-year-old me on a climbing frame. It felt good to be making one of these sculptures (for want of a better word) out in the street, using such an angular, achingly masculine structure as a support. I kept thinking about how the burly men, who even in construction carry a particular reputation, might respond if they happened to turn up early to work. A skinny man in his late forties tying a cotton drop cloth and ropes to the steel tubes of a slightly less temporary structure. A man was putting his bins out and stopped for a couple of seconds, looking at me with a mixture of suspicion and puzzlement, it was obviously too early for him to worry about such things, and he got on with going to the day job. I too have often felt puzzled during this body of work, giving me the opportunity for amazing passages of thought. Especially about manifestation, contradiction and paradox, ephemerality, the re-examination, and translation of ideas into different languages and performed under alternate conditions, the meaning embedded in matter and the age-old discourse of culture and nature. I finished what I was doing, deciding to return to mums to drink coffee and check my emails as I waited for the light to improve to the point that photographs were possible, not even 5.30 and my brain was in full swing, thoughts darting this way and that. I finished my coffee, grabbed my camera, and headed back outside. I took some lovely photographs of the work, long shots, close ups, strange angles from above and below, using the tubes for crops and frames within the shots. I was hyper alert, taking notice of everything, fully tuned in, and filled with the quiet, attentive excitement that has come to inhabit this series. 

The second year of my degree saw the deployment of many strategies and approaches to getting over, to use graffiti parlance. One of which was the production of temporary drawings in space made of black rope fastened to the walls with screw eyes, that also took advantage of existing fixtures and fittings in each environment. They spoke of many things, a committed, just do it approach to making. An attempt at articulating the obvious similarities of various webs and networks occurring at all manner of scales throughout the universe, neural networks, mycorrhizal networks, spider's webs and the astonishingly vast cosmic webs spanning light years and holding galactic structures together. They addressed the resource hunger of my painting practice, reusing the same materials repeatedly. This, in turn, brought up questions as to whether these were different works or the same work morphing around Bonington - NTU’s art studios building. Thoughts of entanglement, manifestation, and temporality, questioning the perceived perpetuity of formal painting and noticing the similarities between these works and graffiti. I had every intention of taking them out into the wild over the summer. Turning up at traditional graffiti spots with a bucket of white emulsion, a battery drill, plugs, screw eyes and a bag full of rope. I’d do what I’d done in the studios, paint the wall white, drill holes, create a network of fixed points and string the rope between them. Take photos (an integral part of this process and that of graffiti) strike the structure and dust. I looked forward to seeing what graffiti writers made of it all. 

However, having taken part in a collaborative art project called Outcome 2023 at Backlit in Nottingham, that culminated with an exhibition called Seeking Roots, I inherited the cotton drop cloth. As a group, we built a sculpture of a tree out of found plant-based materials, cardboard, sheets, wood, hemp rope, string and reems of brown paper that became waste after the degree show at Trent. The member of the cohort who had contributed the drop cloth didn’t attend the deinstallation of Seeking Roots, and I, arch opportunist, seized it, already formulating plans. The university year had ended, Outcome had finished, and the summer was mine. With the itinerant residency in mind, I headed to the woods near my home in Lincolnshire, a place that has already played a key role in my thinking, making and simply being in the five years I’ve lived here. The same amount of time that I lived in the flat on Post Street coincidentally. I planned to use just that small woodland area for the whole thing, producing temporary gestures in space, painterly marks with swathes of fabric made to keep paint away, collaborating with the intelligence of the trees, the fixed points they offered and what they did with the wind and sun to the light passing through the canopy. From the off, I loved the aesthetic of the creamy beige cotton and hemp amidst the bright green glow of the June foliage. The spots and flashes of colour provided by the scattering of wildflowers, even the constant hum of the A1 punctuated by the chorus of birdsong all added to the very genuine experience of the here and now immersion in the moment of existence, it was good. I made five iterations that day, took tons of photographs, and shot plenty of video to use in ongoing After Effects projects. I made the video works “Immanence” and “Cold Synaptic Old Lumberjack Shit” from footage shot over the first couple of days exploring these ideas. 

It was important to leave no trace, for the work to appear, exist, and to disappear as quickly as it had emerged. It struck me that this was a cliched yet profound comment on being, human or otherwise. In literally a few years time nobody reading this will exist anymore, although there may be photographs of us, no one looking at them will have the slightest idea who we were, what made us tick and just what the hell we identified as. Frozen moments of time, representations of physical likeness that for all intents and purposes are real, and yet, they aren’t. Photography has always played a vital role in my practice, although how it plays that role has changed a great deal down the 35 years since I started painting in earnest. As a teen I used a 35mm camera to document my graffiti paintings, the photograph being the only thing the graffiti writer is left with beyond the memory of the experience, though as I'm sure we all know, that can be misremembered, fade and often vanish entirely. Photography’s evolution has been momentous since its invention in the mid 19th century. I’ve witnessed a profound change in photography even in my lifetime. Imagine my excitement in the 1990s as one day processing became mainstream, then one hour!! Many people I know knock digital photography, but I must admit to loving its instancy and versatility in later applications. I adore the romance of the process of shooting film, the clarity of image, its physicality, the object nature of the printed photograph and how real it feels. The past year, however, has seen a dramatic change in my relationship to digital image making and how I incorporate it into my physical practices. I decided this summer to up my game on that front and this body of work provided the perfect opportunity to do just that. 

Opportunism is often a dirty word, but where would any of us be without it? I mean, life finds a way, right? Life fumbles blindly around seeking all chances it can to grab hold and grip on to anything that can aid its proliferation. Humans are just one of myriad products of that total attention and adaptability to the ever-changing conditions of existence. That was the main driving force behind this body of work, taking art making out of the studio and willfully imposing different conditions on it, accepting whatever happened and gobbling up every opportunity that came my way. A full awareness of the right now is something of tremendous import to me, and how thoughts of the past and future filter into that experience of the moment deserves contemplation. What things were has a huge bearing on what they are and will be, with even what we consider fixed changing as we add the coming moments and their commensurate experiences. Even right now stays forever out of reach, as the moment we stop to consider it, it has instantly become the past. 

Painting graffiti illegally is one of the most mindful things I have done, especially alone. It requires complete immersion in the moment and amply demonstrates that multi-tasking is indeed a real thing. To pull off a quality painting under hostile conditions – in the dark, on the side of a train, in an environment where life and liberty are under constant threat, and significant injury can be incurred with even the slightest lapse in concentration is no small thing. It requires courage, self-reliance, belief, determination, commitment, and resilience. All of which contribute to train graffiti being viewed as “real” graffiti and why train writers can be somewhat self-righteous about the purity of their practice. Train writers tend to look down on all other forms of graffiti, and as with many male dominated fields, hierarchy is tangible in the extreme. Tracksides are a close cousin of train writing, though often seen as low hanging fruit, they at least retain some of what painting trains entails. Trespassing, painting in the dark in hostile environments, risking life and limb, many writers have lost their lives painting on railway lines at night. Classic performances of masculinity require a casual disregard for life and personal safety, having the balls, the bollocks etc., these terms haven’t arisen from nowhere. While they can be perceived as brutal representations of destructive patriarchy and overwhelmingly negative, they are also indicative of the romance that surrounds graffiti culture. The paradox of something so ruggedly identity driven also seeing itself as selfless is something I have thought about long and hard for at least the past ten years. I have the utmost respect for those who paint trains, while I was never any great shakes at graffiti, I did a few pieces on trains and even served time for it in 1994. Over the best part of a three-decade period writing, both graffiti and I changed a great deal. What I embarked on as a resolute counterculture, where it was a life of crime and everything had to be worked for and earned, has slowly become mainstream and commodified. Specialist graffiti paint is sold in specialist graffiti shops, it’s all over the internet and regional styles are lost in the mists of time. It isn’t what I used to love, it isn’t what I used to live, and I'm too long in the tooth to be risking my life or spending time in prison for it.  

So here we have “Performative Masculinity” a slightly tongue in cheek title for a body of work that didn’t set out to critique graffiti or gender explicitly. A body of work that didn’t set out to be anything in fact, it was just fumbling about, finding its way out of the world in a process of emergence. I did a lot of thinking, and the consideration of gender only arose from being embedded in the material, feeling like I was hanging the washing out on a weird cosmic washing line. Washing my dirty laundry in public if you will. Gender is only one of many considerations, I can’t and don’t want to claim it as the main thrust of the work. I’m comfortable with and accepting of that which I appear to be. I have the feeling that gender is only so prevalent in my thinking by virtue of attending art school in Nottingham in 2023. Although the notion of artworks carrying any kind of gender is an interesting line to ponder, particularly in relation to graffiti writing. Is gender socially deterministic? Is it a notion imposed externally, or does it arise from within? I guess those questioning gender, both as individuals and as a social institution, are questioning the source of that determination i.e., who gets to make such decisions? Graffiti writing also questions social determinism, in the form of ownership and the hierarchies associated with property. In choosing a pseudonym the graffiti writer chooses a new identity, this then instigates a process of adopting a different set of rules and conventions associated with the culture. New hierarchies that exist within a narrow framework of acceptable behaviours and methods of expression. When I started writing at the tail end of the 1980s, one was expected to be an all-rounder, to practice every discipline that falls under the banner of graffiti. In the 21st century we find an ever more compartmentalised culture that speaks to strong associations with the philosophies of modernism. Division is now king, and it’s becoming ever more unfashionable to think in terms of oneness and unremitting entanglement.  

The drop cloths are about the performative aspect of mattering as a product of earth, a tiny planet spinning about in the universe, as much as they are about being male, a thing I just happen to be for the duration of my insignificant existence. The work has become about deskilling, place, about material, the compression of time and memory, reuse, repurposing, acceptance but also questioning – both myself and my assumptions. It has become about analysis and criticality, maybe even too much in the aftermath of just doing without intent. It has become about strangeness, the otherness of self, authorship, ownership, change, growth, and plain old thinking through doing. It dawned on me as I was making these pieces that I was revisiting old ideas and approaches and that all I'm left with are the photographs, a handful of which I’m going to present in a book. I’ve attempted to articulate some of the thinking that has taken place during that making, but many hours have been spent in solitude, walking, carrying, doing, and photographing, too much to recollect and write as the stream of consciousness this writing represents. I believe culture to be an inevitable biproduct of nature, that nature only exists through the eyes of culture, and hope that even without these rambling words that’s evident in the works themselves. I also believe in intra-active entanglement and that what the human mind in all its inadequacies as an apparatus of experiential quantification perceives as free will may well not be all it’s cracked up to be. I’m a product of time, culture, geographical location, and experiential input, intrinsically embedded in a thing we call reality, but these are merely words and a handful of pictures. I’m just a puny human who is about ready for some lunch, before I head back out to the meadows of south Cambridgeshire to continue my explorations of this weird thing, we have assigned the word existence.  

There’s every chance that we exist simply to be strange and experience the wonders of life as the universe seeks to understand itself. As Kase2 so famously says in Style Wars “Ain’t nothing to it, but to do it” a phrase that has long been my mantra. A phrase that transcends graffiti and any thoughts of identity be it born of gender or not, sometimes you just have to be, do, and try your best to take it all in. 

Peace.