RESURFACE
I grew up in Cape Town, a city nestled between mountain and sea. Relocating to London in the 1980's I experienced an overwhelming urban claustrophobia. The physical world around me now felt entirely mediated with everyone living inside a virtual reality of text and image. I wanted to escape these structures that felt so constraining and lifeless, to collapse them into the something more organic and primordial, to take it all back to a beginning I could inhabit and work from.
Terraforming:
Choosing books, magazines, newspapers from around me, I pulped and then remade them into new surfaces like reclaimed land. The selection drew on my immediate surroundings but also on older internal strata revealing underlying layers of cultural geology.
​
Now I had a primary surface with text, image integrated with material.
The blank page however, is always underwritten by the past seeping through into the present and future. I’m constantly working with and against this history, trying to map out the connections to where we are now and to reshape things.
​
​
​
​
​
Sega Megadrive
The Financial Times
The Picture of Dorian Gray
National Geographic
Noddy Gets into Trouble
The Young Turner
pulped books, magazines and newspaper 65 x 80 cm
COMPOSITE
At the time I wanted some way to get beyond the relentless irony and deconstruction of Postmodernism. I needed to reconstruct but in a flexible and non binary way, something to combine oppositions like form and formless so I went searching through the fall out of Modernism and taking from languages like Structuralism and Brut, started putting things together
​
​
