About Art

The Tent  resides within a series of small-scale oil paintings on wood that have occupied me for the past five years. Completed in 2013, it formed part of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2015, where it hung in the landscape room in Burlington House, curated by Jock McFadyen. For this and a companion piece,  The Hill , I was the recipient of a British Institution Award.  The Tent  is currently on loan to Dean Clough, from a private collection. The paintings in this series are almost all landscapes and share a concern for a singular location or place, at once familiar or commonplace. The image-aspect of a painting resides within the surface, and its accessibility – outward facing, static and open – acts as the way in. Only then, when an acquaintance has been made can the painting begin its work. This work can be seen as a drawing together and disclosure of painterly possibilities, residual references and processes of making: as duration, intimation and desire. For it is in bein

Exhibition in a Box  is a collaborative project centred on the notion of travel, difference and the testing of artistic and cultural boundaries. The limitation of form and space necessitated by the physical restrictions of the specially designed box permit a rethinking of the relationship between form and content. Participating artists are required to embrace processes of replication and reproduction, working to re-consider the physical dimensions of the work whilst retaining an element of authenticity in respect of the drivers of divergent practices. In coming to terms with what appears an artificially imposed restriction, the exhibiting artists will provide a shifting commentary on the historical function of boxes within practice, where the box has been put to work for the purpose of entertainment, ideological critique, aesthetic refinement, as a challenge to the free-market system of exchange and as evidence of a need for spectacle and division. The box, as a container an

Richard Baker, Mark Dunn, Tom Palin, Luke Steele, Adam Stone To paint is to immobilise time. The stillness of the object of painting serves to disguise the temporal nature of the processes by which a painting is constructed. Yet a painting’s surface is built incrementally, and in its stillness offers clues to what it has been—perhaps the only clues to what, in essence, it is. The five painters in this exhibition, disparate though their works might appear to be in terms of scale, subject matter, approach, handling, design and intention, all share a common concern with the fundamental constituents of the painted object: surface, material, vehicle, support, and time. Still  is therefore a dialogue about foundations and concealment, where painting is presented as perhaps the most deceptive of time-based media.   Tom Palin, 2014

The seventeenth century French mathematician, Blaise Pascal wrote, 'our achievements of today are but the sum total of our thoughts of yesterday. You are today where the thoughts of yesterday brought you and you will be tomorrow where the thoughts of today take you.' To the visual artist, the achievements of today, and of tomorrow, are made material and accessible to others through individual works, which are in turn marked by the intentions of those who made them. Central to this making is the culture of the studio, which within Fine Art extends across all disciplinary approaches and functions as something close to Martin Heidegger’s ‘clearing’ or space, in which practice is allowed to show up as practice. Whatever the material inclination of the maker the practice is rooted in, and never less than, the conditions of its making. Yet in moving beyond material limitations, the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts. As a spectator it can be daunting to attempt to