Several months of trying to play; trying to build relationships, trying to work through fear, trying to recall muscle memory, trying to work through mistakes and miscommunication, trying to work with mistakes and miscommunication, trying to build on accumulated knowledge, trying to ride my luck, trying to be fluid.
We are talking about two different scales, two different atmospheres, and two different architectural constructions to maintain a dynamic dialogue through one enveloping concept.

It’s a lament of sorts, to access and loss. In my day-to-day existence, I’m continually made aware of the creeping shift in social spaces from public to private. I wanted to evoke that sensation of suspicion that you get when you recognise your reality is not quite what it seems, a disconnect, where the terms of engagement with space, time and place have changed without your consultation; the neon spelt backwards plus the pulse of the neon going on off is that disorientation. I wanted the time taken to decipher the text, to suggest that slippage.

A pair of jackets for smug retiring couples who, on Sunday afternoons, like nothing better than blowing off the cobwebs cruising the Yorkshire Dales on their prized long-haul touring trail.
Well, Moore, like Hepworth, which I feature in another jacket at Gathering, are these all-encompassing figures in the world of form and sculptural practice. Both hail from Yorkshire, where I grew up, and their practices draw on the topographical imprint of that particular landscape. Like them, I initially studied in Leeds so there was no escaping their pervasive legacy. There was a double-edged sword of reverence but also of having to dig yourself out of being stifled through the process of making work. The way people claim and personalise their possessions through iconography interests me; it’s brazen and jocular. There is a certain heartfelt honesty in that level of investment that can be anathema to a certain kind of staid, cool detachment. Humour is a supple lubricant for the unmooring of deference or earnestness; it’s also a way of marrying high art concepts and pop cultural influences in an off-kilter way.

I love the idea of the composite; the cobbling together of signs as a way of creating new meaning. As a symbol or construction, the duck is an amalgamation of design processes, costuming, a history of animation, product placement, specific pop cultural moments, surface, painting, sculpture, pathetic monument, and erotic swelling. In combination, it may stand as a metaphor for how we communicate both consciously and inadvertently. It’s my Frankenstein understanding of the world around me, and that’s the beauty of sculpture: the scale allows you to change how the viewer interacts with this thing.

I have always had an interest in the production of space, actors and the props within it.  I understand sculpture not only as this contained entity, but also through its autonomy. It is anchored in the same space as the viewer, but also as a kind of grammar or punctuation within an installation. Sculpture can be a means of breaking up the space, a prompt for introducing ideas, fragmentation and contingency as a way to redefine the architectural language. The church, the factory, and the (night)club are all spaces that were formative for me. The constant juxtaposition, key objects imbued with meaning, shifting perceptions, postures and pose, associated costuming, altered ambiences and sonic resonances.  I guess like those spaces I’ve attempted to elicit a particular awareness of the viewers own body within a space.

I believe the personal should be the starting point for any interrogation that attempts to unpick the robustness of received cultural history. Working through my practice, I try to employ tools such as remixing, sampling, biting, encoding, deviance, myth-making, mocking, and decoys. These are agitations or strategies to reimagine the past whilst projecting trajectories for possible futures.

It is an object that is trapped in its skin. It is held in tension between this imposing, overwhelming presence within the gallery whilst simultaneously being contained, awkward and vulnerable; this is the precipice that the ego negotiates. As an object, it examines optics and exploitative capital.

There was a time when, if you were inclined, if you were alienated, if you had nothing else, there was a lot at stake in a look.  There was a possibility to meld your identity into the threads that you wore in a political way. For me, it was critical that you harnessed form, material, cut, visuals, music and postures as a complex negotiation of signs and codes that signalled your allegiance, your attitude or your difference from the mainstream. I like to think about Stuart Hall’s idea of canvases of representation. Not only could you play with and destabilise conceptions of identity, but the language was highly refined; it was coded in a way that resisted the uninitiated whilst creating its value and systems of recognition outside mainstream trends.

The urban environment I grew up in put me front and centre within a dynamic social environment, where buoyancy and inquisitiveness exposed me to different cultures, income brackets, classes, and a cross-section of other age groups and peers of different subcultural affiliations. All this experience has been processed and has now become a kind of technology for navigating the world, but occasionally as you wander around day to day, there are glitches and resets. I would put these malfunctions down to the proximity in those same formative years, to profiling, the potential threat of violence and an ever-present shadow of surveillance. There was a constant necessity to adopt armour, whether physical or psychological, to get by.

Ajamu, as an artist and friend, never fails to confound my perception. Most importantly, like me, he’s originally from Huddersfield - so what’s not to like?  I’ve always admired the way that he’s been able to meld activism with all the complexity of black queer life whilst grounding his practice and the form of his work within conversations of process, beauty, craft making and aesthetics. Ajamu puts images into the discourse that allow black men to inhabit nuance. From the unapologetic to the beautiful.
As a counterpoint to the spectacle of the inflatable,  I wanted to be in a place where, creatively, I felt vulnerable and at risk; this I think, is important for my growth both personally and as an artist. Ajamu was able to bestow that physical and emotional space where, through a collaborative approach, something of that trust, intimacy, fragility and tenderness might begin to be interpreted from the work.

In the mind's eye, distortion is a necessary tool to placate reality. It sounds pretentious, but yeah.

There are a couple of things that I’ve been in and out of that are beyond my control and may or may not have seeped into the exhibition;  Various issues of 2000AD ft. Judge Dredd from the early 1990s, Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt by John Cooper Clarke, Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes by  Shahidha Bari, The Melancholia of Class Cynthia Cruz, Kienholz: Hope | Berlin exhibition catalogue, The Accidental Footballer by Pat Nevin (thanks, George).