Green felt was stuck onto a sheet of 15mm thick plywood to make a work-surface which doubled as protection to a dining table, that was in 1975, and very efficient it was too. In 2006 the table and work surface were relegated to take their place on an outside terrace at my home in the south of France. They used to boast three hundred days sunshine in that part of the world but when it rains it rains! After five years of rain finding its way between the table top and the covering surface, the protective green felt was becoming home to range of fungal growth.
Lying in bed in contemplative mood, I would gaze out through the large french windows whose glass was divided into panes by by slender wooden mullions. Outside the pine tree branches would wave stiffly interrupting the otherwise long-distance view. With very few visual elements in evidence, I came to recognise that I was, in fact, watching the passing of time.
The combination of this now, visually interesting, fungal felt covered plywood panel, a pine kitchen-unit carcass providing three apertures and strips of Ipé wood lying around my studio was enough to provide concrete ideas as to how my prostrate bedroom observations could materialise into an art work. Just because one is lying in bed, it doesn’t mean one's not working!
The mangy, green strip of felt, mutated by time and climate, had become an expression of moments in time to which I chose to add some particularity by placing a random selection of discarded images and off-cuts lying around my studio. Each object was pertinent in its time, be it a numeral, a saxophone reed or images of naked young ladies; associations with such things would pass through the artist’s mind from time to time. The addition of LED lights, changing colour in a time sequence, helps extend the idea of the passing of time.
Finally, the addition of some painted fabric, representing curtains, helps identify these three divisions as windows - apertures through which one can look and, yet when closed, hide whatever may be in existence beyond. These material additions help focus on the central panel, perhaps the ‘now’, with the two outside panels representing the ‘before and ‘after’. This narrow landscape format attempts to express something of ‘time going by’ whilst we, the spectators, watch.
