Abstract for a practice-based doctorate, 2005

This text deals with the fundamental issues that have driven my work and ideas for a number of years. The title was given to a selected retrospective exhibition of my work at The Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University in 2005. I am now writing this piece in order to give a detailed analysis of some specific works where my thinking is clearly evident in the process and selection of method and material in relation to the concerns that have underpinned the work. In a sense the works which I have made up to the 1993 Chardin series (discussed in the text) could be seen as an attempt to determine a working method (scrutiny) which would give me a ‘repertoire’ of secure conceptual and visual material. This enabled me to move on, and into, a position where I felt confident in looking at the paradoxical representation of presence and invisibility (immanence).

I present here illustrations from a selection of fifteen years of work with an accompanying text that tracks a body of concepts that have consistently driven that work, with particular reference to painting. In the text it has been my intention firstly to focus in some detail on these perceptions and intentions. Secondly, I describe the decision making process which has determined the choice of particular materials that have the capacity to embody, or make explicit and tactile those concepts, to develop an articulate visual language. It is my hope that through an analysis of the dovetailing of theory and practice, this illustrated text may constitute both a personal history and a ‘user’s manual’ or reference book. It therefore may be of practical value to those tackling similar problems of the integration of thinking and making.