In 1991/2 the artist fulfilled a long held ambition and travelled to the deserts of Western Australia and the Northern territory. The resultant manifestation of this journey has now been throroughly documented. A large consolidated body of work, collectively known as "Scattering of Dust" embarked on a U.K. touring exhibition, inaugurated at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton University in January 1994.
The ideas assembled here remain uncorrupted, or of any less importance in terms of the artist's own history and development, indeed they continue to nourish and impact upon his current practice.
A certain geographical focus of this journey occurred at the vast, open-cast Iron Ore Mines at Mount Tom Price and Paraburdoo in the Pilbara region of Western Australia where the artist settled into a 'residency' motivated by the vastness of the spinifex and eucalyptus deserts and the view into the history of geological time opened up by the enormity and depth of the apperture in the earths surface created by the quest for iron ore - back into geological time before the fossil record.
This laboratory became the crucible in which the metaphorical correspondences which the artist's work forges were first glimpsed and 'set' for further examination - like a primitive being trapped in the glowing resinous amber and held up to the light for inspection. Working in close collaboration with the company's resident geologists and natural historians the artist had the myriad of bloody-coloured rocks ground into a 'usuable' form to add a geographical authenticity to the work on his return to the U.K. These pigments and coloured dusts have subsequently underpinned in a material sense much of the work produced as a result of this collaboration and mutuality.
This large collection of work, now fragmented and in part belonging to various private and public collections in the U.K. and abroad, remains as a testimony to a remarkable terrestrial journey.
The point of any journey, as with any pilgramage, is not the end, the arrival at some point in time and space, but the gaining of knowledge through self discovery along the way. The journey's end is not to gain some further shore, but to retrace one's steps - to paraphrase T.S.Eliot, we are shown "... fear in a handful of dust", and "What we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."