9 July 2026
Airframe: perhaps an outlier amongst the other paintings in this body of work that is coming together in that there's kind of a lot going on. Jay (Slyce) talked about “spiraling towards possibility” in our conversation a few days ago, and it feels like that's a good way to describe what happened with this work; it overlapped itself like four times over. Which usually rubs me the wrong way, but I think this one might work because firstly, that seemed to genuinely want to happen, and secondly, its all in service of a particular directional motion that requires convergence from seemingly disparate sources. In terms of the subject matter, it's a badly broken wooden fence in front of a flat next to Wood Green station that I pass every day on my way to the studio (and a small satellite dish mounted next to the second story window of that flat). It's a stripe of subject I've been attempting to find the right angle on—I've been photographing flimsy barriers at derelict or soon to be built (or never to be built) properties in my neighborhood for a while now. Construction gate doors taken off their hinges but still joined by a chain spanning the seam between them, warped and flattened chainlink fences. Sometimes even dated and weather-worn security placards on residential facades. The futility of these things—their failure to live up to their purpose—combined with the intense visibility of the recent bright summer days has had an alchemical effect. Heightened by looking at a lot of Joseph Cornell; something about collecting, repurposing, creating a more beautiful, concentrated, precarious experience via containment out of the scrap of life. His work Now, Voyager (1966) has been a recent favorite.