Constructed Narratives: Three Academicians

My practice incorporates painting, drawing and printmaking and focuses on themes including art and science, alchemical symbolism and medieval and renaissance iconography.

I deconstruct, reconstruct and repeat forms to amplify, dissolve or extend their visual connections. Exact knowledge of these appropriations is not essential for the viewer as they are intended to form a patina of signs and symbols, some recognised, some half recognised, others not.

This act of bringing together groups of unrelated objects, signs and symbols links back to my early visits to Aberdeen Art Gallery and the strange and disturbing Marischal College Museum at Aberdeen University. I was enthralled by the archaic and anarchic collection of objects – amulets, spears, old bones, flint arrowheads, shrunken heads and impaled insects – with little or no explanation, unfettering the imagination.

My work in sculptural installation is typically developed through several iterations in which elements are refined or added to in response to differing locations or contexts, often harnessing the work of skilled collaborators.

In Anon, Anon & On & On (2017-2023) a structure which was made to display historic busts for the exhibition Ages of Wonder is re-purposed. A series of castor constructed masks memorialising the anonymity of those who made the old Scots songs and ballads. A Year-End Drinking Coat (2003-2023) is built around a contemporary re-imagining of a warp-weighted loom first shown in Venice and Wroclaw. The singer Jimmy Hutchison wove the fabric for the drinking coat to reflect the lights at the mouth of Aberdeen Harbour. The installation is extended by a series of new prints, Fists & Fankles, Thrums & Tangles. A restored sound-enhancing chair (2000) is shown facing a list of 26 singers referenced in Transmission/Transmitters (2003-23) proposing a list of songs to be recorded in my 74^th year.