5 February 2026
For a few years now, I've been steadily accumulating paper/printed ephemera—mail that comes through the door both (personal and junk), discarded magazines and newspapers I find on the ground, ticket stubs, flyers handed to me on the street, etc. I often make collages with them, and it just now occurred to me that it might be interesting to try turning those collages into paintings. The stream of printed material that one encounters in daily life is steady and unending, so there are always new images and words on the way. Always unpredictable and it always comes to you. Even today, just outside my flat I found some sort of origami instruction flyer that demonstrates how to make a butterfly, and later in the mail was a handout decorated with the silhouette of a butterfly zipping around (dots to describe its trail). Direct from the world's river of information.
3 February 2026
Noting down what Jake (Lamerton) said during his visit about “remoteness.” A useful and interesting word in the context of my work that I had not really pinned before. Came up when speaking about On diversion (which is hopefully going into the show he's curating next month), but I suppose it has always applied as a subconscious aspiration. And I've been feeling it in droves via Lee Friedlander's work, specifically a handful of his many photographs of American landscapes: Livingston, Montana (1970), Knoxville, Tennessee (1971), Victor, Colorado (2001). In these, remoteness is something privately clarifying, all the more rich and attentive for its detachment from the infinite noise and possibility of populated space. Generous in its isolating force.
1 February 2026
Ornament (working title): the interior of my new house has been unfolding itself more and more. There's a wall hook guiding two sets of fairy lights across the living room that looks like a boy's face gazing skyward. Reminded me of the child in one of Botticelli's Madonna and Child paintings (the one from 1470, one of the handful at the National Gallery in D.C.). The hook and lights became the face's body, and as a full image I think these elements simply became an excuse to riff on the way color is deployed in a work from the Mughal Empire that I found via Luhring Augustine Gallery's archives and have been taken by: Bust portrait of a prince, probably Muhammad Sultan, the son of Aurangzeb (probably by Hunhar c. 1670). It's essentially a Josef Albers. Gorgeous tangerine against a sky blue framed by a fleshy faded orange with touches of pale yellows and greens. Ultimately the painting broke away from that scheme (deeper blues, greens, pinks appeared) and it seems like it became about a kind of tension between the oranges and pinks, maybe a relationship that implies but also negates an optical mix.
30 January 2026
Star in a bag (working title, or maybe Stuck star or Third man): think I was interested here in trying to fragment plane and form in new (to me) ways. It seems like the approach was to try to paint like collaging, to allow shapes to overlap while trying to retain the questions I initially perceived in my visual source (which was a plastic glow-in-the-dark star cloaked by a red Chinese New Year envelope). Trying to formulate a process that can cause an incidental explosion from a center or axis and then allow me to probe any fun relationships that materialize as a result. To encourage forms to collide and conjoin and echo each other as they expand outward. A kind of polyphony. Have been looking at Schwitters a lot this week, particularly his 1925 collage Untitled (Heures crépusculaires). Stacked blocks of muted values and slices of visual information coalescing into gradations of color and thought.
26 January 2026
Last night I reorganized a drawer of ephemera that had been piling up in since I moved into my new place. Noting some arrangements and encounters here. Print of the top of a silver spoon protruding from the opening of a Chinese New Year red envelope, which contained a plastic glow-in-the-dark star. On an envelope that contained a wedding invitation: an ink-stamped snowman overlapping a postage stamp with a pink begonia on it, the word “forever” arcing over the snowman's torso. Pink tissue paper cradling a neon-yellow tennis ball. A program from the Tate with some Cézanne apples on the cover partially obscured by a slightly blurry polaroid from Winchester of a black cat nestled into an angle made by two pieces of wood in the guardrail lattice of a wooden footbridge over the River Itchen.
24 January 2026
Began the day sitting by the window in my room under the white morning sun with my eyes closed. Opened them and a black bird flew by.
22 January 2026
Starlight Way (working title): I've wanted to make an all-white painting for a while and have failed at past attempts, but it seems I may have finally found a way into one. Which in my head felt something like approaching the painting as a white Conté crayon drawing on toned paper. The nucleus of the image is based off of a 9 meter sculpture of a scaled model Qatar Airways Boeing 777-9 aircraft around Heathrow Terminal 4 near Starlight Way. The painting doesn't reflect or need to reflect that specific location visually, so the title will change. Maybe just Plane is better...it is. Anyway, the important part is what the paint is doing. The explorations of space, value, line, and yes—plane—that emerged. I think I can trace those elements back to two works I looked at a lot this week:
Phoebe Helander, Wire Form III (Divided Space) (2026) David Ostrowski, F (Jung, Brutal, Gutaussehend) (2012)
Each of these paintings address space/the picture plane/gravity/color in interesting ways, and while it's unwise to reach for these effects intentionally, I do think what subconsciously drew me to portraying the sculpture was related to these concerns via its position as an object unmooring from the ground while remaining fixed to it. And I think what resulted sits at the center of an axis that acknowledges multiple potential trains of thought without committing fully to any of them—emerging from/being pulled back into a place of origin, crossing/being stuck at a horizon, taking off/crashing, dissecting space/being absorbed by space, and additive line/subtractive line.
20 January 2026
Image inventory: Faint reflection of a shower curtain on marble (decay, rust, dirt, sand, columns, metal), toothbrush on its side looking at its reflection in a small broken mirror (blue, melting, recognizing, horizontal, cracking), a new leaf growing from a houseplant (wet, green, light, soil, brown, glistening, dew), Daejeon covered in snow (pale yellow sky, my shaved head), a broken foosball table in the sun (slanted shadows of foosmen, foosmen looking at shadows, foosmen turned up, foosmen turned down), a neon yellow rope and a thin rainbow slouching against a brick wall (phenomena, approaching, slight, long), a light bulb with dew on it, an ashtray with rainwater (preserved, coy fish, shrimp, spooning), orange/yellow windows of a building in Wood Green (sunglasses), a green rubbish bin surrounded by blue rubbish bins (outnumbered), two carrots in a Tupperware container (two are three), a woman sitting on a bus with city lights encircling her (fireflies, string lights), giant advertisement of strawberries and raspberries in a window (blood), cone-shaped light (hood), giant shadow of a hand in the corner of a room.