1974

end

I first experienced art school by accident, thrown out of a window display course I ended up having an interview at East Ham Foundation, it was January late in the term but I was accepted first on the preliminary and then on the full foundation course. I was lucky to be taught by Ed Herring and Jon Bird who were both along with the other staff influential in my work then and choice of attending Goldsmiths’

I remember the interview at Goldsmith’s in 1974. I went there site unseen, carrying a suitcase full of notebooks, I had no idea what to expect. I went to Surrey Docks, I was early.

Fortunately for me Richard Wentworth was on the panel, he told me later, “ when you arrived and opened up the case and it was packed with note-books drawings and odd things, I knew straight away you were for us”

Goldsmith’s found me and I found Goldsmith’s. I became part of a group called the backfields, because we were located in huts at the back of the college. We were like a school within a school. I went to lectures by John Cage, saw Joseph Beuys speak on a number of occasions, listened to Buckminster Fuller at ArtNet in Covent Garden, workshops with Derek Jarman, my tutors were Michael Craig-Martin, Richard Wentworth, John Tagg, Andrew Brighton, Tim Head, Ferris Newton, Peter Logan and Yehuda Safran. The dean of Goldsmith’s that allowed this unique experiment called the backfields to happen was Jon Thompson. I started in 1974 took a year out between my second and third year, graduated June 1978.

2012. I completed a show at the Hansard Gallery, it closed in January 2012 that was a kind of retrospective, a looking back. I stopped looking back for a while, the earliest works in the show were made in 1999. But now I have gone back further to my roots. To things that made me want to be an artist. This show which exists as just an idea right now, will be a kind of on-line exhibition, a kind of blog or tweet to myself.

film 183  1974  Standard 8 Stills

stripes  1974  Standard 8 Stills

me in the seventies

......was my first year at Goldsmiths, I heard Buckminster Fuller talk at Artnet and Joseph Beuys at the ICA in London.

This is a new project, made without funding or with any gallery or space in mind. An exhibition that may never be exhibited. It has no time scale, no end date, a project that may never be finished although its content is already history.