“This show was a departure, or a further push in my practice, in terms of the type of work I do because I used found objects as well as paintings. And I was trying to make them weigh up to each other, trying to make the paintings stand alongside a found object, and a found object stand alongside a painting, in sort of a push-pull.”

“I like the parallels between Samuel Beckett’s ideas and painting. Beckett talked about abstraction, relationship to language, and the construction of language. I like how that operates with abstraction in painting. Beckett was friends with the Dutch painter Bram van Velde, whose paintings he said had nothing to express, and nothing with which to express it … There was a purity in what he was doing, in other words. It’s talking about no subject matter, or the art of non-relation.” 

“In the art of non-relation, it’s not about whether it is possible or not. It’s that it might be the aim, or the aim is to fail — or to fail every time. And a lot of artists deal with that in terms of impediments to a painting. So it’s not a smooth ride when you’re making it, you put obstacles in place so it becomes a little bit more difficult and it’s not just a sweet painting."

“The idea is of an impediment making a painting. There are parallels with that and breaking up language, which Beckett did in his later prose. While Joyce, whom he did translations for and was close to, embellished language, Beckett did the opposite. He took away words … to find the gaps in sentences. And I like that similarity with painting. When I’m painting, I’m adding a lot, and then I take things away. So that they’re reduced.” 

“Beckett said he’d never stick with one creed, that he’d jump around between ideas. At any given time I don’t lock into one thing … I try to move around. With each painting, I’m trying to undo the last thing I did. Because once you realise something, you don’t want to realise the same thing again.”