Whilst at school, from a very early age, I wanted to be a writer. The link to art never really materialized until I met and worked with Fluxus performance artist Robin Page whilst I was college. This ignited a spark in me that has never left. It is the excitement and daring of live performance but in my case, with a pinch of humour thrown in.
In these formative years of my art experience I luckily became part of the madhouse art education experiment that was Leeds College of Art in the early seventies. Here I met other artists, performers and outrageous exhibitionists who were playing, not with products or techniques but with concepts and it was the mantra of “The idea is always greater than the image” that ran through the my Leeds experience.
I sometimes think, looking back at those pioneering days that somehow we were to blame for the subsequent number of shallow or incomprehensible art works that now litter contemporary art exhibitions under the misnomer of Conceptual Art.
My work, whether performed or constructed, is in the tradition of the Surrealists, Dadaists, French Absurdist theatre and Post Russian Revolutionary writers and performers. I strive to reintroduce humour and stupidity into an over serious contemporary art format, an aspect which I see as an important generic omission since the sixties. I have been an absurdist all of my life. In the seventies, after leaving Leeds College of Art I performed in absurd events all over the country. I have been a comedy scriptwriter for stage, TV and Radio, performer, director, and educator and, over the past ten years have been manipulating bizarre ideas through photographic found images and ideas.
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