The Archive

The ground the work grew from

Three decades of practice before the present bodies of work — conceptual pieces, colour fields, smoke studies, and the folding room. The current work did not arrive from nowhere.

Hosts & Icons

The early conceptual works — the sacred and the branded held in one frame. Communion wafers laid as halftone dots become portraits and logos; a Zippo carries the four letters of the genetic code.

Beckham — 3,000 communion wafers on linen, six feet square. Shown at Selfridges, Manchester, 2003
Bush–Blair diptych — communion wafers on hessian
Field — communion wafers on hessian (detail)
Swoosh — communion wafers on canvas
Posh and Becks — communion wafers
Friendly Fire — Zippo lighters engraved A, T, C, G. The Vietnam icon turned on the dangers of genetic engineering: fire from your own side
The Poet, the Oppressed and the Rest — three shells and birdcages in delicate balance: one free (the poet); one locked from outside, the cage without a floor (the oppressed); one locked from inside (the rest — self-repressed)
Swoosh — smoke on paper

In the press

The Beckham portrait made the papers in 2003 — to the fury, The Times reported, of the Roman Catholic Church. The Sun settled for a headline.

The Times, 2003 — "he has been cast in the image of Jesus Christ… Is nothing sacred?"
The Sun, 1 April 2003 — "On me bread, son"

Colour Fields

Paintings — banded gouaches on ultramarine grounds, and slow contour fields where one colour finds its level inside another.

Gouache on paper
Gouache on paper
Gouache on paper
Gouache on paper
Contour field — oil on canvas
Contour field — oil on canvas
Early mandala — acrylic on canvas
Interlock — acrylic on canvas
Swirl — acrylic on canvas

Smoke Studies

Works on paper from the fumage line — horizons, plumes, moons, and smoke pressed into folded grids. Structure introduced; something larger responds.

Horizon — smoke on paper
Smoke and gold on paper — the symmetrical pleroma below a gold line of consciousness; above it, asymmetry nucleates as cogs of smoke. The Nucleations paper's ideas, years before the paper
Plume — smoke on paper
Folded grid — smoke on creased paper
Dream image — smoke on canvas. The screaming dead face a subterranean wall, unable to turn to see what is behind them; only the living can tell them

The Folding Room

Studies in folded paper — tessellations, vessels, black constructions, curls — and the Slade folding course where, thirty years after a first summer there, the thread resumed.

The Slade folding course — where it resumed
Tessellation column — folded paper
Tessellation arch — folded paper
Pleated vessel — folded paper
Black construction — folded paper
Cut-outs on teal — paper
Curl — interlocking form
Curl on black circle — paper

Colour Folds

The recent painted folds — pleated diamonds, rosettes, and the coloured star: four hypars opened and joined, wearing the primaries.

Eight-Pointed Star, coloured — folded paper
Rosette — painted folded paper
Ring — painted folded paper
Diamond — painted pleats
Diamond on white pleats — painted paper
Diamond, yellow — folded paper

Titles, dates and media are being restored from the studio records — what is shown here is the shape of the practice. Enquiries about any archive work are welcome.

One painting, watched closely

The Systema Mundi Totius was documented from the first pencilled circle to the framed work on the wall — May to July 2025, stage by stage.

Systema, in the making

Ask about an archive work

Some of these works are held in the studio; some exist now only as photographs. Both kinds of question are welcome.

Write to the studio