Artist statement

London is a large part of the fabric of what has as far made up my experience of life. In my artistic practice it has inspired me in its everyday comings and goings but especially its history to create a record of it.

The folk tales and histories of London go unnoticed by and large by the public but the new wave of building in London is rapidly obliterated the physical record of many of its tales with cooperate glass towers. This made me move into making historical records with an antiquated technique but using the preferred material of the contemporary city, glass.

The fragility and transparency of glass is well suited with my themes due to the tendency of people looking straight through them while being surrounded by these tales and the short span of time that they are around before being shattered, removed and built over.

The stories I hope to bring to light are a varied mix of history, folktales, myth and clear fiction. Each of these have in common they’re quality in communicating the character of London and the often grim atmosphere which bubbles just below its street corners. The stories of London tell just as much about people as they do the city itself as we are defined by the stories that tell and that we allow to endure. As an example the story of Sweeny Todd (the demon barber of Fleet Street). The story originate in the penny dreadful publications which were often reactionary to issues of the day, the story of Sweeny Todd stems from a real issue at the time of unchecked food standards where street food often contained a mix of any animal that was hanging around. From this beginning it has been transformed to fit with the worries of the new audience for social reform to psychotic revenge it keeps adapting to its reader experience or fascinations. As my interests lay in history and the original context of these stories I am in a strange position of being able to view their modern iterations from the outside and create pieces which straddle both worlds.

The pieces that I create are affected by this meeting of past and present in style and process of creation. With the cutting by hand of the glass panels which is very much an outdated process there is a connection to the past and at the same time the drawing style is very much a product of our age due to how much it owes to comic book art with its institution of line work and a panel based style in the begin of the project. The later three dimensional pieces are also drawings as would be clear to anyone watching me wield the pen like glass cutter. This is important to me as although these pieces could be machine cut to perfection they would lose the human quality that I want to invoke in the same way that oral tradition and hand written manuscripts are inherently more personal than the mass printed word. In more selfish terms I want to chalk my own version of these tales onto the pavement of history for the reason that I myself love the subject.