Ugly Beautiful VIII Artwork

ARTIST STATEMENT "If These walls could talk" Maybe they can. Maybe the layers of peoples lives and the grime of modern living on our walls can tell us tales. That's where my fixation with walls lies. How to represent time in a painting. For what do walls do? Protect us, contain us. They keep you out and me in [or vice versa]. They separate us, divide us, imprison, exclude. They are scarred by shrapnel, daubed with slogans, art and pollution. They are repossessed and condemned and gentrified. It started with taking photographs of them but as they started to be replaced with more and more glass and interesting ones became harder to seek out I started creating my own. On, wood or canvas, with sand, plaster, wood, paint... and, sometimes, gold leaf to fill the cracks where the ills of the world reside I want to make art for the lovers of the derelict, forgotten places. For those that prefer to lurk in the liminal edgelands, where the city meets industry and countryside. For those who see art in the buffed out graffiti, vandalised spaces, rusting metalwork, the ghost signs and the palimpsest of peeling paintwork. You might call them deskilled haphazard juxtapositions or naive abstraction. Maybe urban minimalism or post-vandalism. I like to make something that is taxonomically awkward! Consequently you're as likely to find me in a hardware store buying materials than an art supplies shop.