I’ve recently had a solo show as part of the ‘Margate NOW 2019’ art festival. My exhibtion was called ‘Displaced Portraits’ and consisted of thirty-three, mostly metalpoint, drawings.
I’ve always been a little unbelieving of artists who can easily say what their work is about. But for want of a better way of putting it, I think my work is about time, presence and about the careful and affectionate act of noticing things (this description will have to do for today).
The fifteen ‘Displaced Portraits’, from which the exhibition derived its name, are of people seen in photographs, taken mostly in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, which I’ve found at various times in the same Margate junk shop. These people are all unknown to me. Their photographs capture tiny moments in their lives; my drawings are a kind of meditation on those displaced traces of lives lived in central Europe during that particular time in our shared European history. I wonder how the trajectories of our lives have intersected. I wonder what it is I am really drawing here.
The Margate NOW 2019 art festival continues to run alongside the Turner Contemporary’s showing of the 2019 Turner Prize until January 2020.
You can watch some short videos of my exhibition over on my YouTube channel. See also my WordPress blog, twitter, Instagram and Facebook pages.
