What better starting point could there be than the moment when everything - all matter, energy, space, time and light exploded into existence; under massive temperatures, the first alchemical cauldron, setting off a timeless transformation and entropy. After the cosmic black fog lifts, light starts streaming across space and particles of matter begin to clump together to form bodies. The lights are switched on and start cooking up elements such as carbon, oxygen and iron, all essential for the emergence of life on earth. Bodies slam into one another and merge, debris gets splashed off into space - gradually in the circulating debris other bodies congeal and solidify - Terrafirma!
After the vital strike comes morphology, simple cells emerge from a primordial stew. Traces of these progenitors have been found in 3.5 billion year old rocks from Western Australia: chemical fingerprint s, blueprints of biological activity.
How analogous to the notion / activity of drawing I find this fundamental creative morphology - I like the idea of my work being as un-artistic as possible, stretching and redefining the parameters of my practice, reinventing the idea that remains a constant throughout - the Mind/Body as a Land/Environment metaphor.
Whilst professing an interest in the painting of the 20th Century, particularly the likes of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt it could also be argued that the work originates from a biological, geological standpoint and necessity, such as modern body scanning technologies, archaeology and palaentology, and if forced to identify historical artistic allegiancies, an interest in Land Art strategies more akin to the likes of Robert Smiths ˙on and Charles Ross would also be apposite.
This notion of a physical and psychological anchor; an innate desire for a sense of connection to something fundamentally earth orientated is nowhere more candidly evident and exposed than in the drawings, a kind of literal and metaphorical soil out of which the whole working process grows and evolves.
Ultimately I am more interested in the conceptual nature of art - taking the idea of a pigment, tube of paint, or lump of charcoal and tracing it back to its geographical / geological origins and is ultimately why, whilst the drawings might be an attempt to establish an order from the world around us and to help feel defined, they actually just remain stains, blemishes and bruises of earth on a piece of paper.
Julian Grater