Belle et Le Bete

1978Belle et Le Bete (above) collaged the photocopy sheets of an essay in response to an invitation from Robert Short, a curator specialising in surrealist art, to submit a work to the exhibition, SURREALISM UNLIMITED, For a final visual flourish, I added some colour; cutting out some paint colour-chart rectangles and in summoning the gods of surrealist chance, dropped the cutouts from a height of several feet, onto the work below. Where they fell was where they were glued in place. Shattered by the fact the work did not sell, it was later shoved into storage and forgotten.Some years later when it was being shifted during another house move, I discovered many of the coloured rectangles were missing...... 'Oh yes, your son did that when he was of crawling age - he carefully peeled them off'. What remains is but a shadow of the artwork's former vibrant presences.

1974Knathorn series

The project commenced in the 1970s responding to the sculptural qualities of a found wooden object and the sculptural possibilities of the photographic image.(bottom right) Two exhibition installations (Bristol 1984), Tales Gates and Plank Points, were completed in the 1980s. In Tales Gates, three frames are hinged to the wall and are able to be moved by the viewer. In a later version shown at Experimenta (Melbourne 1989) a video component was placed facing the panels.

2005 The Camera Null series (bottom left) employed a scanner, not a camera to capture the images; these are digitally assembled into the frame of the picture. Unified in this way, the tangibility of the material components move from a utilitarian domain to an exotic context created from unexpected juxterposition of scale and setting.