Being a recipient of an amount of money such as this would be an incredible boost for my career as an artist. Like many, or most, artists, I work around funding calls, making work within the means I have, and I’m really fortunate to have been successful and engaged over the last 15 years in many group and solo projects in the UK and further afield. I’ve been able to make the work that I wanted, but have always just scraped by in financial terms with regard to my art practice. The Dover Prize would allow me to realise an expansive and ambitious body of work, with a degree of freedom that would otherwise be completely impossible.
Studio Doubts
Artists contend with very specific feelings of doubt within their studio endeavours, and I’d use the bursary to look at how the very act of making work in an iterative or causal fashion, with one leading to the next, can manifestly respond to the doubts which makers have. Working in a series of sorts, each work would aesthetically and conceptually support its neighbours. With this body of work, I’d look to construct an expanded single installation akin to a testudo or tortoise defensive formation used in pre-industrial battles.
Exploring Artistic Armour Against Doubt
As individuals, we seek support from others, from ideas or institutions. We strive to make sense of experiences and information. We gather things together to bolster our comprehension of our everyday. Each work I may make feels fragile on its own, but the scale and scope of this body of work would mean that the suite of paintings would form a collective whole. The paintings would be combined to form a legible and interconnected grouping; physically attached together as a representation of artistic (painterly) armour against doubt. Undertaking such a project would not be possible without a financial award such as this, and it is a project which I am deeply motivated to undertake.
Having visited Darlington on numerous occasions, the idea of it being a unique place but that it also shares kinship and connections with other towns and spaces in the North of England fits with my activity of working in an iterative manner. I make work in which one painting connects to the next and thereby generates a sort of woven or networked narrative between paintings.
I’d look to develop new expanded painting suite of work that initially derives from some small abstracted aspects of the Anglo-Saxon histories, the railway heritage and contemporary position of Darlington. From these slight and general starting points, I’d draw outward from them, as is part of my established making practice, considering how they push and pull my meandering and iterative abstract painting processes in new ways. By doing this, I’d effectively be generating new work evolving from connections to Darlington itself, and this I believe, will be an interesting way of positioning an ambitious, abstract body of work within the context of the locale. That there would be a reason for the work being exhibited in Darlington is important to me as this would serve to invite connections with the creative communities in the area.
My ongoing painting practice encompasses an interplay between structured and intuitive gradual abstraction processes; investigating visual patterns, gestures and representations of brushstrokes. My work also as an attempt to foreground the highs and lows of studio practices – making work which invites consideration of periods of working/ not working/ not knowing what to do in the painting studio. I’m interested in thinking about how artists make, exhibit, re-work, love, hate and feel like they have to do what they do. what they do. Recent semi-abstracted paintings have focused on repeated gestures, cursive script and have zoomed-in on small aspects of previous pieces which I particularly like … trying to get to the bottom of what it is about them that seems to ‘work’. Recent solo exhibitions in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and Berlin have made use of painting and drawing processes as well as ambitious, large-scale, expanded installations. I have also exhibited work widely in recent group shows in New York, London, Seoul and Beijing. Ongoing research relates to consideration of what the artist studio represents; what it means to operate in a painting/ creative studio and how the very idea of the studio offers positive possibilities for making, but equally can also represent a barrier to creative development. As an artist who ‘thinks through making’, the development of research is connected to the process of exhibiting work – in order to better comprehend the ways that the work itself operates, and the ideas that it might connect with. _______________________
Selected Solo Exhibitions 2024
Cut Through, Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock 2023
Fragments and False Starts, Studio pavilion at House for an Art Lover, Glasgow 2020
Touching Distance, Mount Florida Gallery, Glasgow 2019
Barrier-Breakdown-Repeat, Werkstadt Kunst, Berlin
Links and Blaes, PS Mirabel, Manchester
Grille, Patriothall, Edinburgh 2018
Restructuring, Mount Florida Gallery, Glasgow
Over / Under / Cover / Repeat, The Bowery, Leeds 2016
Altermodern Painting, The Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow
Altermodern Everyday Archive, New Glasgow Society, Glasgow 2012
Virtual Fragments, The Briggait, Glasgow ________________________
Selected Group Exhibitions 2024
Cat Flap Blink, Terrace Gallery, London
The Shape of Shape, Spit Gallery, London
Paper, Boardroom Committee Room, Glasgow
BEEP 2024, shortlisted artist, Elysium, Swansea 2023
Tightly Kit, Loose Fit, Ortega y Gasset Projects, New York
Three Movements of. Longer Work, Bloc, Sheffield
Opening, A_Place Gallery, Glasgow
Small Works, 57w57, New York
Champs Noir, Terrance Gallery, London 2022
BEEP 2022 – Shortlisted Artist, Biennial of Painting Prize, Elysium, Swansea
Annual Exhibition, Royal Academy, London Unfinished Movement, Generator Projects, Dundee
A Plot, Hatched By Two, Warbling Collective, London 2021
Society of Scottish Artists, Annual Exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh 2020
BEEP 2020 – Shortlisted Artist, Biennial of Painting Prize, Elysium, Swansea
Perhaps We Should Have Stayed, Warbling Collective, London
Sharing a View II, Tsinghua University, Beijing
Sharing a View I, Luxon Academy of Fine Art, Shenyang
New-Iso_Aesthetic, Derby, Artcore, Derby
‘Made you Look’, Instant Whip – Revisiting the work of Fraser Taylor (2024)
Fragments and False Starts (2023)
Barrier Works, Outlast Journal (2020), Risk, Forge Magazine (17) (2017),
Peripheral ARTeries, Biennale Edition (2017), Start with What you Know, Ochre Press (2017),
Collective Nouns, United Newsletter (XX) (2017)
