These paintings are born from my chance-driven way of working in glue and ink where process is both concept and means for a potential image. The material transformation that happens is extremely vibrant, the medium exerting strong agency as it acts with other forces – gravity, air, water and the gestures of my body. It is a fluid, viscous and unpredictable affair. As the medium dries it reveals how it has moved and shaped itself in becoming still. The glue is white at first, making it impossible to see what you – or the medium - are doing. It’s a kind of painting blind that is opposite to the usual way of painting where it is essential to see the marks being made to be able to respond. The glue turns transparent after contact with the air, letting the colours of the ink come through. That is when I see the changes as they are tracked in its residues. These suggest visual events open in their form and ripe for association and imaginative projection.

Open form. Open is another word for vulnerable; form for embodiment. Poetics is the kind of shape and materiality that for me speaks of the sensate, imponderable ways that hold something of the state we are in. Bursts and runs of warm colour, skins of paint, bring edges together, set them apart, but always in intimate relation. The ways they gestate become gestures. I see grief - it comes in waves. There seems a wound in the world. Many things are open. Something stirs. Something being born.

Much of my role in making these works is setting the conditions for something to happen, and going with what happens rather than bending it to my own will to master it. This is my philosophy, a way to bear out materially how human and non-human worlds are interconnected and, in these painted models of a vulnerable but vibrant world, to shift human dominance. One of the conditions is that the canvas be stretched. Placed horizontally on the floor, the wooden frames lift its face off the ground. This lets the medium flow freely, pool and congeal in all its viscous and visceral jouissance. The large scale of the stretched canvas aids the flow but makes it physically difficult for me to manipulate; to get into its centre I would need to stand on it as many do who work on unstretched cloth. I am confined to its edges and can only lean towards its middle. A condition that makes my action precarious. This is not conventional action painting. I am not at its centre. Later, when the painting is placed vertically, I respond with visceral oil paint – but the process is born and grows on the floor.