Having worked within the realm of minimalist painting and sculpture, and active in the mail art network (where I first used the pseudonym the man from ICON and it stuck), through the 1990s I moved into digital photography and video in the early 2000s. This started as a way to explore the processes and systems used to make my paintings and sculptures, a form of documentation as artwork. In turn this led to works about mapping space and time within landscapes, and visual investigations into natural phenomena. Often referencing western traditions and histories of painting, particularly Romantic notions of the sublime, I used techniques such as time-lapse, stereoscopy and multiple exposure in an attempt to see the world in ways not ordinarily visible. During this period I regularly collaborated with lens-based artist Brian McClave.
My current work continues to be preoccupied with landscape as a central theme, specifically in relation to a love of long distance cycling. Churches in my home county of Sussex and water towers in northern Europe, making frequent use of a ferry crossing to France near to where I live, are recurring motifs, both human interventions that mirror my presence in those same landscapes. Artworks are manifested through more analogue means again these days: film photography, writing, printmaking, ‘zines, rubber stamps and stickers, all things that I’ve realised hark back to my days involved in the mail art network. Physical objects related to the physical act of cycling, indicating maybe a deepening engagement with both the act of creating and the environment itself.
