Why do I exhibit my work? Why exhibit at all? Does it matter? Do I need to? These are not rhetorical questions. After more than fifty years of working, I still ask them each time I show my work. Yet a one-person exhibition, set apart from the studio where the work is made, continues to offer something essential. It allows the work to be read – by others and by me – in a way that is not possible in isolation. Unexpected relationships emerge: between subjects, colours, formats, and time. Things that were never meant to speak to one another begin to do so.

The exhibition at Strange Cargo in Folkestone includes work from five decades, since leaving Edinburgh College of Art and later the Royal College of Art. It brings together recent paintings with selected works from an archive rarely seen as a whole. Some of these pieces have not been shown for many years and may not be exhibited together again. A loose nautical thread has surfaced, without being planned. Crabs, turtles and fish appear alongside images of Folkestone itself, the seaside town where I have lived for the past decade. The sea has a way of insisting on its presence – as subject, material, and metaphor. At the centre of the exhibition is a large painting, 244 x 122 cm, depicting a small boat crossing on December 14th, 2022. The work was made over the course of a year and filmed intermittently for a documentary; Blue Has No Borders. Although my contribution did not survive the edit, the painting remains as a record of sustained attention – slow, physical, and unresolved. Because my bath – where I stretch paper – was not large enough, the initial drawing was stretched and filmed in Folkestone’s Inner Harbour among the fishing boats. The process was precarious. The paper stuck, threatened to tear, and the resulting surface bears the marks of that risk. The accidental finish – rippled, uneven, resistant – is not illustrative but physical, closer to the effect of the movement of water itself.

This is one reason I continue to believe in exhibitions that are experienced in person. Online images flatten everything that matters: scale, surface, duration, presence. An exhibition creates a theatrical situation – a shared space in which work is encountered rather than consumed. It is also one of the few moments when an artist can meet their audience directly, without mediation. That exchange remains central to my understanding of what it means to create art.

I have never been interested in visibility for its own sake, nor in courting the commercial structures that dominate much of the art world today. I do not make work to order, or to satisfy a market. Sales, when they occur, are welcome – but they are not the purpose. I paint because I have to. Exhibiting is part of that necessity, not a strategy. I remain resistant to the language of pricing and valuation. Art is not an asset class, nor should it aspire to be. Poems do not carry price tags, neither should paintings. The financialisation of art – as storage of wealth, as a mechanism for tax avoidance – is antithetical to culture itself. It matters, then, where the work is shown. Strange Cargo has been a participatory arts organisation in Folkestone for over thirty years, committed to the idea that art can bring people together across backgrounds and experiences. I have collaborated with them before, including on The Votive Fishing Fleet, for which I designed a tile – another work included in this exhibition. Their ethos aligns closely with my own: serious about art, and serious about people.

This exhibition is not a survey, nor a retrospective. It is an opportunity to see work from different moments brought into dialogue, in a space that allows time, attention, and physical encounter. That, for me, remains reason enough to exhibit.

Article from The Jackdaw Magazine