Colour-blind features shots of two domestic settings that could be read as part of a single narrative – the one representing what lies behind the other – or as two separate scenes at odds with one another – one somewhat kitsch and banal, the other rather more disturbed.

A multi-coloured plastic tassel blind flutters in a darkened doorway, obscuring the view through to a room beyond. Next to it, a short looped shot appropriated from the movie version of American Psycho features a room strewn with garbage, its walls decorated by blood-coloured splashes and graffitied text that reads ‘Die yuppie scum’. As the camera pans quickly around this room, the space is revealed as the realm of an unhinged obsessive, with chaotic painterly angst hinting something sinister and disturbed.

Colour-blind was first exhibited at Waygood Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne in 2003 as part of the exhibition ‘Tuesday is cerise’. The two clips were projected onto a pair of screens standing at an angle of approx 120 degrees to each other, each screen measured 300cmx400cm approximately. In 2007, a new single screen version of the work was created and a soundtrack added  to both intensify the sense of paranoid claustrophobia and to create a definite beginning and an end. 

View 2007 version of Colour-blind here

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Car Splash, a  series of screen prints, appears to document a romantic or even heroic moment. What might be the record of a wave as it breaks on the shore, or an abstract expression of painterly angst, is in fact the product of more everyday

phenomena: the abstract splashes in these images were created by car drivers carelessly manoeuvring their vehicles through giant puddles on rainy days. Being the victim of a car’s splash on such a day causes minor annoyance to pedestrians going about their walking. Car Splash elevates this moment to one of sublime painterly beauty.

TV Car Splash further develops the theme of the Car Splash images. The three-monitor DVD installation features footage appropriated from TV car adverts and a TV show title sequence. The splashes have been removed from their original environment and posited onto a black background. Each of the short splash sequences is looped for continual play.

Pane was created for the exhibition 'Stay' at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sunderland. Images of broken windows were printed onto clear plastic film which was then adhered to the surfaces of the windows in an area of the gallery known as the art-lounge. Pane caused a subtle and unexpected transformation of  the space. The usually slick interior was infiltrated by a series of images that reflected on less kempt, less immaculate spaces. The apparently broken windows reminded the viewer of the urban decay visible in more unfortunate buildings, some of which may never receive the kind of make-over style redevelopment that would eventually lead to their transformation into a gallery or museum complex.

Kitchen Towel Top 10 transforms an every day domestic object, the disposable kitchen towel (or kitchen roll), into a minimal ikon, imbuing these chintzy cushioned sheets with a status beyond their more usual purpose of mopping spillages.

Each design is carefully drawn in graphite pencil on a white primed canvas. The 10 top designs hang in series on a white cube gallery wall.

Seaham Deneside Utopia (the Memory Map) was the result of a Creative Partnerships residency project at Deneside Infants School, carried out as a joint project with artist Sneha Solanki. The project looked at creative activities carried out by children at the School when cultural partners visited. Seaham Deneside Utopia shows a map with the school at its centre. The area around the school is one of forests, mountains and pastureland where farm animals graze. Each of the symbols in this area shows the children’s feelings about the work they created when working with visiting cultural partners. Beneath the school is an underground system of sprouting seeds and rooting vegetables next to a lake where fish and other water-creatures bask and swim. These areas show the teachers feelings towards the activities initiated by cultural partners. From beneath the earth and beneath the lake,the teachers are encouraging the growth that sprouts in the forest and pastures above.

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…Not just for Christmas resulted from a six-month residency with Northern Print Studio – an open access print facility in North Shields – and The Solution Group – a design and marketing consultancy based in Gateshead. Members, staff and directors of Northern Print and staff and directors of The Solution Group were asked to create work based on three initial briefs:

Pets Make Art – a chance for owners to collaborate with their pets in the creation of a work of art.

Gifts – “what do those folk at the other organisation really need”: a kind of gift exchange.

Collection – a chance to make something in response to the notion of a collecting and “the geekish anorakism that leads people to collect things”.

These briefs were communicated to Northern Print members and to staff at The Solution Group in the form of a newsletter taking The Solution Group’s own quarterly newsletter as its source.

Alongside the exhibition, the project resulted in the two organisations exchanging gifts – a bound and cased set of A4 images from Northern Print entitled “objects that we think The Solution Group needs...” and a singing artist dog toy, Pierre August Rover, from The Solution Group.