The drawings on this website date back to 2010. Before this date I thought of myself as an installation artist and before that a performance artist and so drawing, although important, only became my primary practice after 2010. This change followed the completion of my PhD (2000- 2008), creating a distance with the earlier work and so the drawings on this site date from this time.
I live next to the river Wye and I began several of these drawings from a rowing boat upon the river, which I then developed in my studio. The lockdown affected my ability to work this way, calling for a different approach and some of the newer drawings originated from screenshots of live-streamed broadcast concerts, which I animated into little movies and made drawings from these. This method of using on-screen moving images continues and characterises the most recent work that can be seen in the completed series ‘2022. Winterreise lockdown’, as well as provisional work in the ‘Ongoing’ section. The river remains a source of fascination and I continue to draw upon it while developing other subjects that can be made in the studio.
The ‘Vanities’ section reaches back to 1966 with photographs of me standing before my artworks from early art-school days onwards. The image of the artist, posing before the work is a typical art world cliché that I did not pay much attention to until I realised I had more than fifty years of these pictures.
Academic Papers
A section entitled Academic papers includes a range of papers delivered on the theme of Marcel Duchamp’s hallucinatory writing on the Jura-Paris road. This really begins with my essay published by the Tate Gallery in Tate Papers, outlining my eventual PhD thesis on the military themes in the work of Marcel Duchamp 2007. Included here is the English version ‘The Beat of 5 Hearts: Dagognet, Duchamp, Marey and la route Jura-Paris’ published in French by Editions Matériolgiques in ‘François Dagognet, Philosophe, épistémologue’ edited by Gayon, Bensaud-Vincent and Braunstein. The paper was delivered at the ’François Dagognet Colloque’ at Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne in 2019.
