Work

House-less heroes, incensed preachers and Queen’s square cowboys. Covens of Goths bespangled in stripe and steel piercing, clustered beneath statues of metal men. The Subway Army, skaters and skimmers and hooligans.

I’m based in Wolverhampton and paint my way along my part of the world. I’m drawn to constructed identities and local mythologic characters. I had an uncle named Gordon who taught me how to use a chainsaw when I was five. There was plenty of this sort of thing in the area growing up- women and men painted larger than life in the rich wash of our shared imagination. The West Midlands is steeped in local heroes and anti-heroes. They fix themselves upon cul-de-sacs like stars in the blanket firmament, stitched into the tarmac of a local area or suspended in a stringy web of association and lore. Pigeon breeders hold Birmingham Rollers in their calloused hands and hard men become soft as they cradle these virtuosic little acrobats. Our sculptured spirits remain unweathered by the winds of the ages, only chipped and altered by tongue and tale. We pass the chisels and hammers to our children in recalling these characters, and, because history is often a series of statues, we encourage their reshaping through sideways words and fractured memories. The men we have sat upon horses and upholstered with steel are far more brittle than their facades may belie. Statues are rarely eye-height, they sit proudly atop plinths after pulling the ladder up behind them. These old aristocrats and their dull eyes reflect none of our regional majesty back at us. I’d like to begin mapping our individuals and these histories across canvas and tapestry, researching through pints in dingy boozers and conversations with corner-shop crooners- lending an ear to local legends and affixing our Black Country in the annals of time. What does it mean to be from the Black Country? What does it mean to be a character in a tale shared over a pint? What does it mean to build ourselves through oral histories as we would build knights and fairies of old?