Saturday 8th February, 2025.

I am a loner; I have not shared space with another human being in nearly two weeks. That statement is, of course, both true and untrue, and human is an otherness I keep in my pocket for special occasions. 

I make no secret of being vegan. It is an idea I came across long ago, and one that has come to define who I am. An ideology that has seeped so deep into, not just my psyche, but every atom of my being, it is second nature, if it makes even the slightest sense to refer to it as such. I see all animals as my relatives, as my equals, my sonder extends to them as increments of the entirety, and as far as possible I will do nothing to harm or exploit them. I have been vegan for many years now, and while I allow the bearing witness and evangelism that others seem to think are essential to the life choice, I have still found myself on the receiving end of considerable hostility for how I have chosen to live and let live.  

I like cats, according to Squeeze it’s cool for cats and cats are undoubtedly cool. Cats are elegant, self-contained, independent, beautiful and dangerous. Where dogs are endlessly needy, cats are the opposite and simply couldn’t give a fuck. If a dog wants to be your friend, so what? If a cat has chosen to spend time in your company, it feels like a divine honour, special in the extreme. 

When my mother’s husband moved into the house, he came with a cat. They had named her Ash, and me and Ash became fast friends, she was luxuriously soft, ginger and white with black bits, and loved to sleep on my bed. One day I noticed that Ash was, I strongly suspected, pregnant. Sure enough, over the next few weeks, she got decidedly bigger in the middle and her stomach had things moving about inside it. On the day the kittens were born, I came home from whatever crappy job I had been at; to find Ash unusually clingy for a cat, she would not leave me alone. I went upstairs to run myself a bath, and almost immediately as I climbed in, Ash went into labour. She didn’t know what to do with herself and kept trying to climb in with me, between walking back and forth with a kitten hanging out of her. I washed as quickly as I could, I was nearly as excited as she was, the air was charged with magic, new life was entering the world! 

I had read a few things online and had made her a nest in the bottom of the wardrobe, you are supposed to leave them to it, checking on them intermittently. She wouldn’t stay in the nest and seemed to want me to be near her, so I made tea and went to sit with her. It was soon all over and there were two miniscule, little cats in the nest, with Ash more interested in something under the wardrobe. I reached into the space, and it didn’t take too much feeling about to discover another tiny cat under there, a marmalade queen, and I gently pulled her out and put her with her siblings. It was the week before Christmas, and I had just witnessed one of the most incredible things I have ever seen and felt. There was a black and white tom, and two queens, a tabby and the beautiful marmalade coloured one I’d rescued from beneath the wardrobe. I decided they were to be called Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. Mine were the first human hands they knew, and for two of them they would be the last as well. 

With all that in mind, why on earth call a body of work skinning cats? 

The phrase “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” is an old one, with numerous postulated origins. It speaks to the fact that there tend to be multiple methods by which to achieve the same results, something my worldview thrives on. My grandmother was raised on a farm in Suffolk and used to say it often, and is no doubt why it has become ingrained in my memory, part of who I am. My grandmother was a momentous force upon my life, my formation. Loving and kind beyond measure, always smiling, always ready with a hug, an understanding ear, full of old-fashioned words and phrases, a bridge to the life that was, a connection to a world now ended. Granny died in 2016 from old age, but she was suffering from dementia, and watching her slow deconstruction by that disease was an awful thing to witness. I say she was suffering; we were suffering, it was as though she had been stripped back to her youth, her “optimum age”. As selfish as it feels, the last time I saw her she had no idea who I was, and it broke my heart, I am crying now just thinking about it. Needless to say, I miss my granny dearly, though when I look up to the sky on an overcast day and see a break in the clouds, I distinctly hear her tell me “There’s enough blue for a sailor’s trousers”. She is in me, she runs through me, she is part of who I am. 

I have been thinking about selfhood a lot over the past few years, what it is to be a self, an “I”, an individual, and how that notion is constructed. How we are exposed to thoughts and ideas and either adopt or reject them, becoming little more than a collection of decisions and reflections. Self is just a story, a process, a series of incidents and thereby incidental. If self is understood as a node of accumulated thoughts and ideas that are both shaped by and shape experience, any notion of a fixed identity simply melts into the ether. Self becomes the field that produces nodes of experience, the manifestation of autonomous feedback correction that is noticed by the meta cognition of that which experiences. As I witnessed with my grandmother, that self as born of layered experiences can be broken down and stripped away just as efficiently as it can be built, and so the story of self becomes untold. That the cult of the individual has gained pace, driven by the grand narratives of the great acceleration, driven by globalised consumerism, driven by this desperate need to be somebody and express an identity is telling. It is said to be peculiar to the west, to the “developed” world, a world of illusory choices that lead to division and atomisation, but just how different are we really? Or, to put it another way, just how real are we really? 

I languish in thinking of reality born of paradox, where edges bump against each other and trying too hard to grasp only ever results in missing, where irony is pauper and king. A space of contradiction, where the living are the realised aspirations of the dead, their hopes manifest, projected onto futures coexistent yet frustratingly out of reach. The multiverse is nested, and time expanding bubbles. “I” am not what I appear to be, and while I adore slippery irony, Alan Watts was much more eloquent in his descriptions of it. 

We find ourselves at the whim of both sprawling historical and subtle micro - narratives, tales, stories, poems and songs, some progressive and some decidedly retrograde. It is often as if time pulses out from each of us in spherical ripples, crashing into the temporal ripples of all else that has existed, and at these sites of constant and uncontrollable collision, reality is brought to bear. There are more theories of being and time and art than one can shake a stick at, furious attempts to conduct what is often perceived as chaos yet is undoubtedly merely the unfolding of processes so complex they exist way beyond the comprehension of its effects, we are, after all, just products, means by which the firmament can contemplate itself. 

While on the face of it, one may look at these paintings and see nothing more than gutless zombie formalism. Commodity fetishes, exemplifying the invented traditions of the landed, exploitative class, who see all on earth as resources for profit to be extracted from. Symbols of Euromerican oppression, exclusionary, boxed off containers of categorised modernity with which to decorate the parlour wall. A series of works that lack imagination, collections of exhausted tropes and conventions. Emblems of the baggage painting carries, art with a capital A, subcategory painting with a capital P, objects that aren’t quite strange or idiosyncratic enough to really be considered art at all, that is half the point. 

The thing is even aiming at making ugly paintings, trying to buck against the aesthetics and politics of surface, one still subsists in this space. Painting is painting however it is cut, even graffiti with its extensive ranges of custom paint reward the affluent, those best able to play this selective, chamelionic game. Perhaps it would be better to make no art at all, my problem is that I love painting, privileged or not, problematic or not, I love painting with a capital I, L and P.

I am somewhat obsessed by ratios and scalability, working consistently in a ratio of 4/3 at various scales in my constructed paintings for some time now. A true formalist, my supports are, of course, the spine of my practice, providing a solid, democratised thread by which all the paintings are linked, enabling pushes in multiple directions stylistically and materially. At all times the paintings reference one another, regarding the support, be that in finish or highlighting the construction in other ways, such as painting around the edges, or not, leaving the surface bare in sections on the face, or choosing a more rural, unfinished, nuts and bolts aesthetic. 

The work is mindful of competing temporal concerns, concerns exhibited in both the looking and making, in each piece and the body as a whole. Rapid applications made cold in seconds and minutes, due to the accumulation of paint, take days to dry. The highly contemporary shine and plasticity of the gloss medium infused acrylic plays off against the arcane aesthetic of the jute and hemp rope. The simple geometry employed as the unifying pictorial device, 4/3 rectangles squared off leaving a quarter of the rectangle as a remainder, takes just seconds to read. However, when displayed as intended, in a grid, the individual pieces take on new complexions. In conversation with one another the repetitions become syntactic, and a language starts to form, dialects and accents become noticeable, and the slow but distinct rhythm of the work emerges. 

That grid too, is scalable, manifesting in microcosm in the weave of the jute, repeated in larger less uniform modalities in select areas of mark making. It is expressed once more in the layout of the many parts as they unfold to reveal the whole. Undulating, fluctuating, expanding and contracting, resolute yet irregular, dispersed yet compressed. Endlessly reconfigurable, each painting can be placed elsewhere in the combination like words in a sentence, those sentences rearranged to make many different paragraphs. The body can be added to, subtracted from, manipulated, with new relationships created through incremental change. Ideas are assigned different weightings in each instance, as multitudes of possibilities are made tangible. Each painting a pixel, blinking on and off, a dissonant oscillation providing the illusion of movement, like block theory at 50% resolution. Never so much about what is said, as about what is not. 

It becomes apparent that space holds equal significance to matter, that gaps and hollows are gestures on an equal footing with both the contact and non-contact mark making, along with the generous dollops and thinly applied spread and splattered fields of colour. The occasional escapes around the edges of some of the paintings accentuates those concerns, and passages start to appear, moving across the body entire. The distribution of marks and matter are not peculiar to one piece, the conversation takes place in multiple locations, some within earshot, others across time. It is often overlooked that space too is composed of atoms, somewhere in the region of 9 billion per cubic centimetre in fact, and that the spaces between matter also carry shape and form. This emptiness is not just the potential for things to matter, it is a mattering thing in its own right, and while slippery to consider, there to be contemplated none the less. 

The differences then, are relative, scalable, increasing or lessening to varying degrees, with boundaries simply melting into becoming.  

I’m regularly accused of self-absorption, well, on the very rare occasion that I find myself in human company. The fact is, there is very little self in here in which to be absorbed, identity for me, is a mirror, a shiny veneer beneath shattered glass reflecting fragments of a distorted reality back out into the world. Fake authenticity is the rap, hence vacuous paintings that could be at best described as indebted to the likes of Marden, Rothko, Hollingsworth, Bogart or Tapies. And at worst derided as derivatives of the above, reconstructed crime scenes that do little more than jog the memory with a hollow ring of contemptuous familiarity. Swinging wildly between styles that are pure Toby Curtis and surfaces so empty that even possibility disappears like a puff of smoke on the westerly breeze. 

I have had to give myself permission, on numerous occasions, to do less. Finding myself straying further into the desert with every weary yes, go on then, if you must. In a world obsessed with borrowing from the future, borrowing from billionaires rather than asking them to pay their taxes, I sit here all alone borrowing heavily from the past. I used to labour under the belief that I had to earn the image unfolding before me, there is every chance that in my advancing years I have become too permissive, in treating history like a never-ending trust fund I have become lazy. It comes as no surprise that interest is so low on these particular loans. Perhaps the boundaries, then, are the obvious limits, be they to imagination or technical skill. I adore the work and approach to life of Jack Whitten but lack the ability to do anything with his titanic output. Lacking the hard currency to dig into my pocket and buy myself that golden ticket. 

The tensions arise quite organically, waiting at a perpetual red light on the crossroads of crisis, I know I need to turn left, drive into the breeze, but how do I force those fucking lights to change? Pulled in so many directions it is inevitable that one goes nowhere, stretched to transparency like the hides of those destitute felines. 

This body of work inevitably spills over into further bodies of work, skinning cats becomes empty signs, just flatter, emptier, possessing of altered dimensions. Stripped down re-presentations of bodily activity, frozen fragments of the ongoing ripples of time, standing on the brink of oblivion or recombination and granted the permission to not even try to understand. Really, it’s all the same, any claim to otherness is simply a game, Deleuzian, Derridian strands of incomprehension faced with the entirety of existence. It is no coincidence that the mycorrhizal network, the neural network and the vastness of the cosmic webs are governed by the same fractal construction, scalable and irreducible to their constituent parts. Any otherness encountered is truly just a reflection of the strangeness of self, a self as one of infinite centres, each familiar and alien in equal measure. Each colliding in iterative intra-activity, co-production ad-infinitum, every moment the beginning and the end. 

So, who am I? A series of layered amalgams of the intellectual properties' past, or a foundation for future constructions as we pave over the bones of our ancestors? The churches designations change but the footprints remain the same. The space forever tainted by the curse of Tom Friedman, although it is me who feels like a tiny ball of shit.  

I’m very into the idea of literary streams of consciousness; this is one such piece of writing, produced in one sitting, with very little editing. All or nothing, all for nothing, no going back, full of the undoable (that which cannot be undone as opposed to feats of amazing literary prowess), mistakes worn with pride like the scars of a life well lived. I paint the same way, full of bold actions that can never be undone, I live like it too, at times victim to my history, at times victim to a history somebody else made up about me, a whole lot of baggage for a tiny ball of shit. The story of “me” is not just peer reviewed, but co-produced, the ongoing process of a gang of disparate scribes, relieving “me” of some of the pressure selfhood builds over time. My life is a joke, a situation comedy, and while I may not be in hysterics, the wry smile of acknowledgement is often overlooked. 

With the minimal and maximal trading blows of incompatibility, the heroic stance of one becomes the countenance of cowardice in the other. Micro and macro, endlessly interchangeable, each thought as real as pebbles held in hands, the planets in their clusters no more than beaches full of sand. The numbered billions of bacteria unnoticed by the organism their cities form a world within, each particle reflecting sunlight back into space. Quantum entanglement says yes, there may be many ways to skin a cat, but they share a simple substrate. Call it nature, universe or God, each a synonym – there are indeed a great many ways to skin a cat. 

This could, of course, be nothing more than fanciful bullshit designed to try and fool the gullible into believing paint smeared supports and paper signify all and yet visualise nothing. The tailor turned swindler, blowing smoke up the emperor’s arse, who the fuck am I to tell. I have no agenda beyond letting you be, the politics can take care of itself. If I make a joke you find offensive, walk away, please don’t hold it against me for eternity, evidence of my tasteless shape, for I was never in that club. I sit outside it all, the beating heart that pumps to no end, a cluster of every perspective and contradictory truth. I am the manifestation of all there was, though equally insignificant, “I” am “you”, and from the tension comes the music. What lies between our ears the twin of all there ever was and will be. 

Accept the equanimity, flatten the hierarchies to scalable exactitudes, and revel in the fact that even lost in the crowd, one is never truly alone.