If you like to know how things are made

The mural in the first room is painted directly on the gallery walls. I've used a technique invented by the Romans. For many of their best inscriptions, a scribe would write directly on the marble with a chisel-edged brush with a red pigment called minium. This writing was carved out with a chisel to preserve it then the carved letters were repainted in red to make them stand out from the white stone. Most modern typefaces have unknowingly copied the forms naturally created by the swiftly moving brush. The second room contains several large drawings and a framed piece. Each of the drawings was made with a different tool on a painted MDF panel. They were done in the gallery just before the start of the exhibition.

The smaller, framed piece was completed in a single eight-hour session. I'm right-handed but this was made with a pencil using my left hand. I'd worked out roughly how long to make each line on a computer but, in making the piece, I had to adjust things as I went along because the forms were never quite the same proportions as the computer typeface.

That leaves us with the piece on the floor. Every day I make a new painting, replacing the previous day’s work. Each one will use a different tool or medium and may well remain wet during the day. When the exhibition is over, except for the framed drawing, all the works in the gallery will be destroyed.

If you like to think about art

The framed piece is called Drawing Itself and seems to be an essay about drawing. Its premise is that drawing is always of something and never just drawing. It asks if it is possible to have simply drawing itself. In order to answer the question it borrows a mathematicians’ trick of jumping over to a world where a similar question has already been answered and then jumps back again to discover an analogous answer to the original question. In this case the other world is that of writing where we always write about something. Is there such a thing as just writing itself? After discussing a possible answer to this, the essay comes up with a solution. Around the room are several instances of what could be construed as drawing itself. However, there is another drawing in the room which is a much more likely candidate...

The mural in the front of the gallery is obviously a review of itself but it knows that. It is the first work I’ve made which explicitly begins the process of subsuming writing into art. The definition of art as inexplicable understanding comes from a phrase used by Iris Murdoch in a 1959 essay for the Yale Review, The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited. She uses the phrase in a derogatory way to describe Emanuel Kant’s concept of art objects. However, taking it out of this context gives us a powerful characterization of art in general. This only works if we ignore the aesthetic attitude where art sits in a realm by itself generating ever more lofty and ethereal ideas. Rather, we can put the definition to work by testing how well art is able to explain its arch-rival, writing.

Consider the understanding wrought by art (I include the understanding for which individual works of art are responsible and the understanding for which the existence of art is responsible). I suppose it's a commonplace argument to say that without art we miss something about the world: obviously we miss the art but we mostly miss the work done by the art. What is missed is irreplaceable and cannot even be approximated or simulated for those jobs would only ever be taken on by writing. Writing, by which I mean rational explication, is what we use to understand everything yet it falls far, far short of any ability to grasp art. The common argument would be that, therefore, we have two separate categories, writing and art; this despite the appalling attempts by writing to take on art, to treat it as a traditional, academic subject, to inject a shed load of Theory into art practice, to consider that art history (as understood by writing) is on a level with art. Things have almost reached the stage where art is merely the justification for the existence of writing about art.

Maybe we are missing something. I firmly believe that writing has something to hide, a weakness, a limit to its explicability. I see no such limit imposed on art. What if we were able to harness the inexplicable understanding of art to look at the limits of writing? What happens when we pitch one against the other? For me the results of this experiment become more and more fruitful and exciting.