The Portfolio of Works to date...
..I'm looking for the essence of memories; memories that climb back through the smoke of the hellish industrial landscape of bygone Stoke-On-Trent - the City that my forefathers inhabited, that generations of my family worked and died in.
As well we all know Stoke-On-Trent is a rapidly developing city mutating and evolving into the future and shaking away the roots of it's ancient industrial past - it is determined and noticeably becoming a new economic hub inhabited with all the characters and players that cornerstone every modern British city nowadays; the Hilton hotel chains, Nando's and all - familiar and formulaic as they may be... there's no point bleating about it as a lot of people do; growth shapes change, but for now yet, just around the corner under the construction dust lies the old town with it's ancient story and characters!
I am there of course.. and my work brings to life the City of Fire and Beautiful Bricks ...
The references to the past aren't altogether in the 'Listed Buildings' that sit dead and unused on the high street. They have become iconic in their perfectly preserved state but somehow look lonely - people stare at them and marvel, but they don't always connect. Some great talent needs to weave them into some giant story of this heaving conurbation that awaits writing as yet, but at least they're now guaranteed to be a part of the future somehow - I believe the real story resides in the row upon row of terraced houses; the workers houses (now being demolished by the square mile), the working people of this place and their deep family histories.... When I was a kid, visiting here on my parents annual return home, I was, and still am fascinated by (and terrifed of, back then) 'the entry's' - the playgrounds and growing up 'turf' of my parents and beyond... so many people connect with them as depicted in my work and they tell me so with excited faces, as my parents recollect too; people from all tiers of working society; Labourer to Chief Executive... they reconnect with their childhoods here... my work is driven and influenced by such places; memories and subliminal references and influences. Two years ago I stayed in Staithes and found in the local gallery an artist named Ian Burke; who through silk-screen printing, and painting delivers a fantastic story of this ancient fishing village through a set of old photographs of the historical inhabitants. Last year I stayed in Filey, and discovered Frank Brangwyn up in Scarborough... within the last few months I went up to see an exhibition by Joan Eardley in Edinburgh - her Glaswegian street-kids.... it's all become a beautiful creative soup! These artists are reinforcing and validating the direction I find myself travelling - I've been poring over old maps from the Stoke-On-Trent of 1890 and thereabouts for the last five or six years because the stories that folk tell, including my parents, reference places on these maps, and also more so because the City and it's layout are being redrawn for the future.. the streets are being lost! I've always been fascinated by my own family story as far as I know it, and the fact that I came here to become a part of it - it's a great tapestry of influences and they're driving my creative endeavors...
I want to illustrate those stories; the claustrophobia of living in the shadow of the industrial workplace, the looming effect of the dominant industry sitting ever present and and huge at the end of the street where you live - never out of sight, and never letting the worker forget it either!
My research draws on the old stories; it jumps out of the old maps and photographs - I rebuild lost streets, and reconstruct distant memories from the minds of those who remember the gritty gravitas of working life in pot banks and coal mines... and stories passed down to them through generations who lived through the sheer primitivism of an industrial landscape of a city... I remember when I arrived into it all ... the story is just as involving, just as exciting, and here it is!
