Making Public | Artwork

A group show, with the exhibition title Ascertain, at Espacio Gallery in late July 2024, organised and curated by LuminNoir Art

A video of my three works, listed below, at the Ascertain exhibition at Espacio Gallery

I showed three works in this exhibition:

Leontius (2024) Oil on canvas 120 x 120 cm

Diplomats I (2024) Oil on canvas 70 x 90 cm

Diplomats II (2024) Carved yew wood, glazed porcelain 20 x 20 x 65 cm

I was given the Viewers Award following the Ascertain exhibition; an award, I was told, which reflected the interest shown by exhibition visitors in my work

Shortly after the Ascertain exhibition I gave this interview to Jonathan Hillson of LumiNoir Art, for Savant Art Magazine

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Semillero, meaning seedbed or nursery, is the name given to a group of cross-pathway post-graduate students who, per Owen Herbert, "believe that a contemporary art practice should, alongside artwork outcomes, have supporting elements which are open, accessible and self-reflective." Owen has co-ordinated the group, which is co-hosted by Ernesto Soto Madriñán and supported by Briana McCarthy and me, with photographs taken by Dennis Ngan.

Shortly after the MA final show in July 2024 I received the email above from Alistair Redgrift of Mall Galleries. I applied for the Crinan residency and although I wasn't selected I was included in the shortlist

I was invited by Georgia Nelson, an artist who teaches at the École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes Saint-Nazaire in France, and the director of that art school, Rozenn Le Merrer, to the opening of the Turner Prize at Tate Britain. Following that evening, and having sent them images of my work, I have been asked if I would hold an exhibition, and give a talk, at the school next year. The current suggestion is to organise a joint exhibition with Jean Paul Sidolle, an artist, collector and curator of what he refers to as "phantom art" dedicated to ecological threats and with a particular focus on elephants. This proposal is at an early stage, but it would be wonderful to hold a joint show in Nantes with Jean Paul.

The home page of Jean Paul Sidelle's website

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Proposal for the MA Research Festival, the title for which is Unresolve, to be held at the South London Gallery in December 2024

I'm proposing a discussion between me and a fellow MA student, Briana McCarthy, exploring the many questions thrown up by my research into my principal themes of violence and confrontation.

The format of the discussion will involve my posing a set of very short, seemingly simple questions around anger, confrontation and violence designed, ultimately, to demonstrate not only that we are not immune to the impulses we see operating amongst those who have ended up fighting each other, but that far from smothering those impulses we at times foster and even encourage them.

My initial thinking is that I would pose these questions to Briana, but I may change that and involve our audience, or perhaps a combination of the two.

As a backdrop to the discussion I would like my very short (30 second) animation, if finished in time, played on a loop behind the two of us, gently reminding us that anger, if unsuppressed, can escalate.

If this isn't perceived as going beyond research, I was also proposing to position my sculpture, Mr P, on a table in the room with a variety of head gear including hats and wigs, and invite participants to choose a single item which best reflects a message they might wish to express. The purpose of that request is to test our collective appetite to take, or not to take, sides - and from my own perspective to help me decide whether or not that matters.

I have created a long list of questions. I have not edited it yet, nor discussed it with anyone, including Briana. It will be heavily amended and shortened before the Research Festival, but I set the list out below to give an insight into how the very early thinking on this subject began and evolved for me.

Very preliminary draft list of Research Festival Questions

Why does a war happening a long way away from us matter to us?
How do wars start?
Why do wars start, and is that a different question?
Who starts wars, and again is that a different question?
Why can’t we stop them?
Whose responsibility is it to stop them?
Is there a difference, in relation to the above questions, between different forms of government – autocratic v democratic – or doesn’t it matter?
What makes you angry?
How angry are you capable of getting?
What does that mean? Ie to what extremes would you be prepared to go when angry?
Would men answer questions 8 - 10 differently to women?
Is Virginia Woolf’s view, interpreted by Susan Sontag as: “war has a gender, and it’s male” accurate?
Do you watch violent films?
Do you like watching violent films?
Are there some violent films you like watching and some you don’t.
If so, why the difference?
Do you play violent computer games?
If not, why not?
If you do, what do you like about those games?
Are there limits to what you would be prepared to do in one of those games? For example, if you had to kill a child to get to a goal or earn a prize and win the game, would you do it?
What if AI could create a game in which you had to kill a realistic-looking member of your own family to win the game? Would you do that?
If yes, how would you justify that to yourself?
And how would you justify that to that family member if they saw you doing that?
Does watching war and suffering on TV upset you?
Is there a limit to how much war and suffering you can watch on TV?
How do you justify turning the TV off when you reach that limit?
Is there something within you that reacts to bad news which isn’t an unadulterated sense of compassion or pain?
If, for example, you hear some bad news, do you feel an urge to tell someone about that news?
If the answer to that is yes, what emotion do you feel, not when you first hear the news, but when you relay it?
If you pick up a newspaper and it contains an image of violence, a dead body for example, are you in the slightest respect drawn to that image?
If the answer is yes, do you recognise a conflict within yourself between an impulse to look at an image of violence and your emotional response, perhaps one of pain, to that image?
If the image is of a dead man, is your emotional response different to what it would be with the image of a dead child?
Does your emotional response to the image depend on the circumstances surrounding whatever led to that image? Ie would your response vary if the image were of a child killed by lightening against a child killed by an act of war?
What would your emotional response be if the child had been deliberately killed by a specific individual?
Would your response predominantly be one of sadness, anger or a mix of the two?
Does “revenge” or “retribution” – not “righteous indignation” but something akin to that feature as a justification (in your mind) for violence?
Are you drawn to narratives (within the entertainment media) which rely on violent retribution?
Do you justify your wish (if you have that wish) to watch those narratives as the acceptance of a moral code which says that violence is a justifiable response to a “bad” action, and the worse the action, the greater the violence that is justified?
Are we all essentially good people who are prepared to condone violence as a response to bad actions?
Or is there a part of every one of us which is prepared to see an unrestrained, and so disproportionate response to a bad action?
What if that might be expected to lead to a never-ending escalation of violence?
Is the upshot of this that all of us, including artists, do need to engage in the politics of that debate.
Different tack – If you saw a husband and wife having an argument on the Tube, would you intervene?
If your answer was yes, what would you say to them?
If your answer was no, would your answer be different if the husband hit the wife?
What if, instead, the wife hit the husband?
If your answers to 45 and 46 were not the same (ie you would intervene if the husband hit the wife but not if the wife hit the husband), how would you explain the difference?
Would your answer to 46 be different if the husband began to cry?
If the argument were between two men, would any of your answers be different?
How much does fear for personal safety play a role in your answers to these questions?
How much does embarrassment, the fear of being noticed by others, play a role?
To what extent are your answers rational – “This looks like a domestic dispute and I can’t possibly tell who is in the right and who is in the wrong, so I’ll stay out of it”?
If a child were involved, either as a party to the dispute, or as an obvious child of one or both of those engaged in the dispute, would your answers be different? [Where is this line going?]
If you are on the Tube and the Tube is stopped because, you are told, someone has thrown themselves onto the track, do you feel: sorry for the person who has died; or annoyed because your train has been delayed?
If you felt sorry, would your answer change if you were stuck for, say, an hour?
If you then felt annoyed, would your annoyance be directed solely at those running the Tube system, or would you direct some annoyance at the person who had died?
Are you as compassionate as you like to think you are?
Not really a question for anyone other than me but is the only thing we can all do is accept that we each have a responsibility to make our individual views known, that those views need to be that violent conflict is not acceptable, that bad behaviour that provokes violent conflict is not acceptable and that those responsible for controlling both the original behaviour and the violent response to it themselves have an overwhelming responsibility to all of us to deal with both. And that in reaching that view, we have to accept that most of us share the impulses that lead to many of the conflicts we see around us.