Rocks can be seen as so simple and prosaic and yet they are immensely complex and subtle and usually taken utterly for granted; endlessly fascinating, containing so much accumulated information about time and travel, each tells it’s own unique story. Theirs is a visual history mapped by the colours, texture and shapes of each piece.
While land artists like Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy and Chris Booth work in real space I prefer to imagine my ‘sculptural worlds’ by painting them, this removes all kinds of practical barriers (location, materials, engineering etc) and leaves me free to push well beyond the possible.
I am also interested in the relationship between the monumental and the minute and explore this by radically altering the scale of the stones I am using, also the scale of the environments in which I place my installations are ambiguous allowing further interplay. ‘Are these large or small spaces’, ‘ what size would I be if I was in there’ and so forth. It allows me to introduce a narrative element to the work, since the rocks themselves are inanimate I presume to tell their stories through my own imagination. I have invented a world in which my rocks do all sorts of wonderful things.