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.

Simulacrum of David Beckham — 3,000 communion wafers on linen, six feet square. Selfridges, Manchester, 2002–03

Bush–Blair diptych — communion wafers on hessian

Field — communion wafers on hessian (detail)

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)

Column, with the artist — laminated card. From the earliest years of the practice

Study for The Poet, the Oppressed and the Rest — polaroid

Meander — thousands of painted squares finding their way

In the press

The Simulacrum of David Beckham made the papers on 1 April 2003 — to the fury, The Times reported, of the Roman Catholic Church. The Sun settled for a headline. "I wanted to show how people worship Beckham almost like a saint — it's a modern-day act of devotion."

The Times, 1 April 2003 — "he has been cast in the image of Jesus Christ… Is nothing sacred?" Photograph Mark Waugh / MEN Syndication

The Sun, 1 April 2003 — "On me bread, son"

The work also entered the academic record — cited in "Cultures of Sport Stardom: David Beckham and Anna Kournikova", in The Sport Star: Modern Sport and the Cultural Economy of Sporting Celebrity (SAGE Publications).

Colour Fields

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

Smoke Studies

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

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

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

Smokescreen — rifle held in smoke, light

Plumes to a crease — smoke on folded paper

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.

Large folded hypar in front of the sea — Large hypar — scored and folded paper, 2026. The concentric fold at scale, by the sea

The Slade folding course — where it resumed

Before the fold — the sheet scored, nothing yet raised. 2026

In the Round

The fold leaving paper — white folds in clay, dark pods, and a heart with its tree of vessels. Some are studies, some finished works; the studio keeps both.

Folded forms in white clay — a gathering

Heart and vessels — sculpted heart with its branching tree

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

Moving Image

Arte Quarantena — made in the stilled weeks of April 2020, when the studio shrank to a room and the materials to what was already in it.

Arte Quarantena — film, 2 min, April 2020

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