LOCKDOWN

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The Covid19 lockdown has changed things for everyone, not least for artists who are adjusting to new ways of making work in different circumstances. For me, this has meant a change to a smaller, more domestic scale, as the studio is out of bounds. It’s involved a change in medium, focussing on watercolour.​

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My process then shifted too, I noticed friends posting pictures online of benches enrobed with red and white hazard tape, preventing the benches being used for that for which they were intended. The result is a kind of three-dimensional calligraphy, in how the tape is wrapped around the bars and planks of the benches, a casual quotidian rhythm, making marks in space, different on each bench, like a poundshop Christo.

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I gave friends instructions on how to compose source photographs for me, and this is a chance lockdown collaboration, between the worker who wrapped the benches, my friends who photographed them, and myself who painted them.

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With thanks to Liz Ritson, John Alder, Laura Lancaster, Maynard Partington, Alice Herrick, Matthew Bovingdon, Nancy Isherwood, Ellen Wilkinson, Matt Weaver, Rich Hyde, Rebecca Morrill, Anna Kenneally, Iain Bolton, Mel Jones, and Craig Fisher.