Art Is Science- Opposites Attract, The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse, City Foxes, Sigmar Polke...

So. I spent the summer in London. And I just couldn't make. I stopped wanting to create and instead I wanted to live, be out there. An extrovert... so I complied. Topped up my travel card, joined the queues, followed the line, moved down the platform and further down the carriage, visited galleries, adhered to 'critic's shoice', caught some shows I 'simply couldn't miss'. But somehow the sensory saturation left me exhausted. I had nothing to give. And I simply didn't care anymore.


Now I'm back on the farm and it's pretty isolated here. Days replace days. Things replace things. Although my world has become smaller, it is intimidatingly grander. There's no escape from nothingness. Living rurally, I often experience inner conflicts between feelings of peace, revelling at the majesty of nature and conversely, feeling overwhelmed and isolated by the vast expanse of bleak emptiness encompassing me. This emptiness needs to be filled.


I often think about the city fox.  The city fox has always been a creature I admired, flicking the finger at urbanisation. Country fox numbers have been controlled. But the city fox has no predators. We're on her patch. I envy her. She came from the country and thrived in the city, adapted. I see little difference in her opportunistic scavenging, bin raids, slinking sneakily throught the shadows, to our juggling office politics, 'networking', throwing up on the night bus, ascending to the dizzy heights of a grim tower block in a piss stenched lift.

The point is this. As the town mouse and the country mouse discovered, opposites are great. I can't work in the city, I can work out of it. But I'm not sure I could work without the city. I need it to be the spark to my fuel, and conversely, the water to my flame. I have the chemicals but I need a reactor.  Chemistry, biology, sex...
Art is science.
Exciting things happen in the space where opposites meet. My work is about conflict, contrasts and subversion, exploring conflicts of opposites- town and country, masculine and feminine energies, innocent themes subverted by dark, sinister undertones.


I'm under no impression that I have been inspired by a divine source, an artist is no more gifted than a non artist. Sigmar Polke's ''Higher Beings Command'' and ''Moderne Kunst'' (1968) spring to mind, the ridiculing of 1960's art critic obsession with abstract expressionistic urges ordained by a divine source. We have merely developed a visual language...so art is...
a science? A craft? A skill?

to be cont...