It is not possible to speak the whole words,
or show the whole of anything.
Movements and actions suggest a direction inside.
Public art was always the angle as a concept of a means of producing the location of the artwork, as much as the work was always a coding of actual locations, particularly in the plotted cluster of vignettes which scored the dwelled landscape as folklore ensconced in stone moments of dramatic turbulence, set amid subterranean river sequences and shallow plateaus surrounding the Mersey’s northern shores where I spent my childhood.
Public in the sense that the art isn’t specialised towards a school and is ignorant of the idea of a clientele arrangement, has no known brand identity, and has taken decades of slow development unmediated outside normal transactional art networks. The aesthetic has become of itself of it’s own accord and nature rather than a previous concept of something being aesthetically derived from established DIY forms such as the fanzine. Another name could be Open Source, an untethered possibility where the Public Art is not commissioned it arrives mysterious and unheralded. Another name could be Off Grid.
The work is still a story in process but what were once the settings of tales of youth now the songs are atomic and celestial, the meanings defined as remnants of love, stories of loss and grief for everything passing by on the water.
A Mersey hollow. circa 2018
These locations became ingredients to an aesthetic output across different media, as the stories that once filled the landscape faded, the visual language developed an insular brogue.
Duration Painting
The one brand that I did name and identify with in the late 90s when these urges began to find the form, was ‘Duration Painting’ which back then was applied to seeing film as paintings bound by duration, but equally looking at binding drawing and painting to lengthy durations with novel materials, media and storage possibilities. Time wrote glorious songs of decay on these surfaces, some of which are decades old, some predate the project’s first coalescence at the end of the 20th century, and all have found their form in this duration of quiet.
In the space where the importuning personas habitually sculpt their presence there is nothing but the hollow, no artist nor instruction of how to make one.
What’s left are windows and doors
to something inside stone cells
this grief excavating
Finding form in the duration of quietness.
in lithographic memories
what ghosts see
and the egg outwith the river
where our dust settled on the stone
the moss garden 
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