Until the early 20s I was a self-taught artist. Drawing and painting from the moment my hands were able, with a deep passion for art until I became more than a little sidetracked by graffiti writing in 1989. I spent the next thirty years obsessed with painting, though not as many people would understand it. Towards the end of this three-decade period I became less and less interested in graffiti culture, with its rules, homogeneity, senseless politics and male posturing, and I started making paintings again. I was never any great shakes at graffiti, but my level of commitment was high, and my involvement with the culture was tremendously significant to me. Upon producing formal paintings an intense period of crossover ensued, as, while full of the excitement and wonder of doing something fresh and new, I struggled to leave behind the assumed identity I’d worked so hard to build. I was painting straight fusions of graffiti and abstract expressionism. Breaking down the tropes of style writing, stripping down the self-obsessed, author as subject styles I’d crafted in the belief they were me, yet trying to hang on to that self and the dynamic movements my muscles held deep in their memory. An obsession with the object nature of the artwork began to develop, finish, surface and other Modernist concerns moved to the forefront of my thinking and making. 2020 offered a unique opportunity to reflect on my life and ask some serious questions about my direction of travel. Was it a midlife crisis or the inevitable result of being given a breather by what has become known as the pandemic? The answer to that I shall never know, but I decided to apply to university to study fine art as an undergraduate. On the 20th of September 2021, the 7th anniversary of my great friend Fish’s tragic suicide, I started my Ba at Nottingham Trent. I sit writing this in July 2023, and as would be expected, a whole lot has changed, and my practice has exploded.  

I currently work in painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, digital video, sound and the application of generative techniques to all the afore mentioned. My interests lie in explorations of art theory, art history, objecthood, democratisation, minimalism, matter and material agency. Questioning selfhood, identity and authorship within a variety of formal, political, philosophical and spiritual frameworks. Utterly conventional, breaking no ground, entirely derivative and wholly reliant on things that have already happened. Making great strides just to find myself nowhere. I’m still caught between the past and future, fumbling about, moving forwards and backwards as if bobbing around, treading water in a sea of non-linear time. Interrogating my former self and the decisions he made, reacting to the products and thinking of that human being. I no longer find myself fulfilling a mandate, either stylistically or culturally, and I'm starting to ask what I'm doing and why, though all through the filter of acceptance. Punk and hip-hop culture remain influential to my practice, with a resolute belief in self-reliance and a do it yourself aesthetic. Ultimately though, it’s all waffle. I say I resist categorisation because I have no idea what I’m doing, wafting cluelessly around the universe waiting to die. Nothing means anything, nothing matters, ugly, pointless art by an ugly, pointless human. Agency, selfhood, freewill, control, they’re all illusions, and I have no idea what I’m doing or why. 

Contact tjhc14@hotmail.co.uk with any questions.