The title for this Show comes from a large canvas diptych entitled

“LOVE IS BLACK” 2019.

The Painting was exhibited at the Transpalette Centre D’Art Contemporain in Bourges as part of my solo show entitled “Your Top Is My Bottom”, curated by Frank Lamy in 2020.

On the surface of the work, the following words and letters are writ large.

“Kind + Emotional

LOVE IS BLACK

I NEED A HIGHER LOVE

Love is black

OOOX”.

This is the first time I have shown drawings, paintings and sculpture alongside each other in Berlin.

Many of the drawings have been made in Lockdown 1.

It is strange how the texts lock me in to the Work and reveal themselves in time.

The struggle has always been to relieve myself of self and hand the work over to the not yet known.

Like a boomerang, the self returns in unexpected ways.

Many years ago, I read an interview with the artist, Robert Gober in which he describes a feeling of “coming home” in the work, placing identification above understanding.

This had a huge impact on me at the time and still does.

It suggests that the Work might know more than me and requires a flexible degree of intuitive connection.

When drawings go on the wall, they face a kind of litmus test and are either sent to what I call the “settling room’ or reintegrated into the piles of work in progress.

The works have a way of telling me when they have arrived, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly.

I have come to realise that I am just another material in the mix and I have to work with what I’ve got.

Like the “Good Wolf, Bad Wolf” story from Marcus Aurelius in which a little boy asks his grandfather who wins in the battle of the wolves, the answer is always the one you feed.” - Simon English

Lockdown

Strange things happen here

LET IT IN

I CAN’T GO THERE

Ghost

FUCK ME NOW

An adventure in love / not recklessness

Cornelius Broadway Bridge

Addiction

New day. Tuesday week 4 isolation.

Isolation makes you needy

Isolation makes you needy

Stoned love

P for prick

P for prick

You disappeared

It’s what you do

I can’t go there

Hungry

Pretty Polly Village Parrot

Empty

Spoon

DAWN

Playful

Ke

Parrot (John)

Enter narratives

Where were you last night?

Good place

Playing fields lee valley

Whisper

Chinese whispers

Careless whisper George Michael

I can’t go there --

Why not me

Needy again

Validation

Bridge

Love

I can’t go back

Lockdown eased- I can go – there

It was a dream

I can’t visit my mother in Dorset

I can’t go to Limehouse

I can’t go back

I can’t go forward

I have now

Indecisive

Perloine

Percival

Pigeon noisey

I wan’t Scruff

I can’t go there

Percival purloined pleasure partly perhaps pertaining playful pretty Polly’s place permanently pertinently potty- or you

Isolation

Long hair -----

I LOVE YOU

Victoria Park Closed

Squirrel Forest

Were the fairies having fun with me?

One more time

Worms

Actions

And again

It’s time to deal with this

Why have

Long isolating by choice

Now you

You yearn for the other

Too much time turns the head

Too much turns