Arrested Time And Movement, 1993

It was all a question of containment.

Created at the time I restarted my art activities, this work is made up from a collection of simple pieces left over from my various painting experiments. The central panel emerged as a simple abstract composition and was enhanced by a cream coloured surround cropped from out of a display panel with an existing blue outline printed onto it. I found this exercise to be quite pleasing, but no more than that, it was consequently laid to rest in a plan chest together with my collection of drawings, prints and paintings on flat surfaces. There it remained unexposed until the spring of 2005 and the arrival of my circular saw in my studio.

The original image was uncovered by accident, but on inspection something about it seemed to merit further work. Just as the dark central content is framed and contained by the light coloured card surround, so too did this assemblage seem to want to expand. A shallow wooden black box frame was made to contain and exhibit the existing collage, the size of the dark back panel requiring much consideration. The resultant size ended up being quite tight to the original, somehow containing and restraining the movement within the picture. The result needed to go further – the addition of found objects was the answer and a few items collected from my music shop in Bristol found their way to complement the composition.

As a result, this box seems to have somehow arrested any sense of previous movement in the two dimensional space of the original composition, as well as having arrested the time required for anything to move within it; thus the title, 'Arrested Time and Movement'.