Cement Works

Acrylic on canvas
100cm x 100cm

I am a qualified urbanist and architectural researcher with postgraduate tutorial work at Manchester School of Architecture. My background is also as a Courtauld Institute post graduate in early Italian Art History and festival culture in Sardinia.

I am a sculptor and printmaker with several small bronzes, and large work in steel and wood. I won the Gertrude Hermes Relief Print Prize in 1988 for a large linocut. I have continuously exhibited as a painter and printmaker since the 1990s. I won the New Light Patron’s Prize in 2018. My work is in several public galleries including The Fitzwilliam, Cambridge and The Whitworth Art Gallery.

The cement works was derived from a large etching of the same subject, a factory on the quayside at Portslade, West Sussex. The subject was emblematic for a recent difficult encounter with my brother where we were both travelling in different directions and needed to cement our friendship.

I had recently returned from a visit to Tuscany where I saw a number of 13th century painted crucifixion panels. These were surrounded by small scenes of the lives of the saints. This Portslade structure in the Sunday morning light seemed to stencil its own shadows revealing the scale of the machinery on the ground and on its tower. These shadows are an important part of the encounter with the space of the open steel frames, the dust suppressing nets and screens. The flanking road was covered in a cement dust and there were temporary feeder pipes and unusual structures that recall Piranesi’s etchings of impossible prisons. The outcome was an image that absorbed the light of the south coast and repeated a series of X shapes at differing scales allowing us to see many aspects of the structure from other angles within one view. There are traces of a previous industrial painting in the canvas exhibited.