Property

“That property in land and liberty among men, in a state of nature, ought to be equal, few, one would fain hope, would be foolish enough to deny. Therefore, taking this to be granted, the country of any people, in a native state, is properly their common, in which each of them has an equal property, with free liberty to sustain himself and connections with the animals, fruits and other products thereof.“

Thomas Spence — Property in land every one’s right (Proved in a LECTURE Read at the Philosophical Society in Newcastle, on the 8th of Nov, 1775 ).

All of the work I’ve been doing over the last few years has drawn me towards questions around the nature of property and possession of land in all of its aspects. There is a strong case to be made for the nature of our relationship with land to have been formed through the application of the Inclosure Act of 1773 and the establishment development of Landscape Gardening that created the bucolic ideal we reference in our current defences of the naturalness of vistas that are entirely man made.

Somehow this thinking has led me to make a series of works that culminate in a way that I can only explain by outlining the process and identifying the influences that are inevitably applied at different stages of making.

You should always look down on a circus (maquettes)

In 2002 or 2003 I made a set of small maquettes, like these that I reproduced in 2021 but that might have looked a bit more like these.

Sketchbook pages from 2002/2003

From these wax maquettes I made two drawings, first this one

You should always look down a circus (drawing 2003)

And then this one

you should always look down on a circus (spaced)

I made these on Fabriano Accademia 200gsm Cartridge Paper, stretched to a big drawing board leaning against the sideboard in my living room. Which says nothing other than that we can’t always have easels or afford studios.

Moving on, life intervenes, work gets intense, other drawings inveigle themselves into your consciousness and drag you off with their peculiar indulgences. But at the back of your mind you know that this moment of oddness is part of something that hasn’t surfaced yet.

In 2004 I took a Masters in Creative Technology at Salford University having left work to do so and in 2019 after retirement I undertook an ACE National Lottery Funded Project in an empty shop on Scot Lane in Doncaster.

Then Lockdown!

emptying the shop for lockdown

In March 2020 I managed to move my kit out of the empty shop just before the Announcement.

Waste Ground

The following month I decided to clear and plant a patch of waste ground that I thought was unadopted rather than anyone’s property, at the back of the garden and that was where the next project began.

Patch dug over

This is the point where I started to think more deeply about my relationship with property and the notion of ownership of the natural world.

This first began to manifest itself through drawings

Balby Garden, April 2020

Made on site initially and developed in sketchbooks and small maquettes…

casting stones

Balby Garden Sculpture June 2020

I made a series of Garden Sculptures using casts from stones found in my pseudo allotment and using gold leaf and oil paints.

The set of these are on the website

Garden Sculpture Web Page

The quotations used as titles for the pieces are mostly from TS Eliot apart from “Fiction is not imagination” which is from Baudrillard’s ‘America’.

I had become concerned with the translation of sources from one media to another with the geranium project (the ACE Project) and it continues to be at the core of the work I do. Translation might not be the most precise word to use but addresses the primary motivation for the activity I engage in. The way I express myself is through the objects and drawings I make and they carry all the varieties of conversation, discourse, polemic, broadside, joking etc.,

One year later, March 2021, I dreamt about the circus drawings and then made a whole series of new drawings and new, simpler, maquettes.

You should always look down on a circus remade

New Circus Maquettes

These figures related to the garden sculptures and to the forms I was seeing in the garden, and imagining into the virtual space.

I gradually began to merge the figures into new sets of drawings. I should indicate here that I work on sets of drawings simultaneously and carry marks and textures and colours and patterns across the set as it evolves. The process involves copying, mono-printing, overlaying and waiting for surfaces to dry and can involve collage, usually of the drawings themselves as I search for the form to emerge.

Circus Drawings 2 of 4

I spent the next year working on a series based around tori (toruses) that is currently sitting in abeyance.

C-View Studio 2023

In May 2023 I moved into my studio at C-View.

Red Garden Three 2023

In October I returned to the garden to start working on the Red Garden Series of drawings and sculptures.

Three Trees, Red Gardens, in progress

These figures were based on forms of trees in the garden and the strangeness of the red films.

I spent several moths working on iterations of these sculptures using anything I had to hand.

Three Trees Half Size

Dancing Partners

Studio 30/05/2024

Having the space in the studio was what enabled me to build out into the garden, does that make sense? Perhaps it should be to build in from the garden.

All the time transferring these objects into the VR environment by scanning into Poly.cam and importing those objects into Blender, then to Unity.

Studio 03/07/24

Towards the end of the year I started to extend the world of the garden in VR and decided I needed to be able to play with scale in the developing environment. I had at this point been led to read much more about enclosure and how tied in to British Politics it was in the 17^th Century alongside the development of landscape gardens and the engineering of what we now regard as the countryside.

Flowerbed October 2024

The flowerbed drawings and sculptures came along at this point.

Flowerbed Sculpture 2024

You Should Always Look down on a Circus 2025

The sculptures from 2003 have been made at full size now and the VR world is all there, although there are still some refinements to do including sound issues and perhaps the start position.

Drawing

I’ve continued to draw every day;

The July drawings can be seen here

…and the June images here

There is a link to the previous month’s Gallery on each page.

Or you can go the Galleries page on the top menu

The drawings are posted to  Instagram each day.