My take on me and perhaps many others.

I'm not a philosopher, but they just had their pipes and their theories.

So here's my theory. (I don't have a pipe).

At this point in time I'm exploring the other side of myself.

Not another side, the other side.

I am saying there are two sides.

You could also call them levels.

Perhaps they are the psyche and the Id.

Bear with.

Working as one, tempering each other, they are can achieve extraordinary things.

Complete separation leaves you as a useless machine with no purpose.

Or a dangerous one with a bad purpose.

Part separation will leave you as an invalid in some way or the other.

Compromised.

Not fit for purpose in a world of competition.

This leads to suffering and sorrow.

Every time.

I'm going to call these two sides thoughts and feelings.

Because I can.

It is within the realm of "feelings" that self-treachery lies.

Because the truth lives there too.

And so, I find myself investigating this alien domain. Alien because I've ignored, or buried it for a long time, for personal reasons and from what I have felt to be social pressures, exacerbated by a world that wants the fit and the strong, the young and the beautiful. The smile. Everything's okay. I'm happy and successful. All this is a breeding ground for self-treachery, and for a market that will sell you what you need to make up for all the things they tell you you're lacking.

But I feel the world changing, relaxing its insidious, inhibiting, formal restraints on what one should be and how one should behave. And this may well have subliminally cooperated with my own efforts to explore this "other side."

I'm using the same carving techniques as I have always done, but the process is vastly different – I'm creating, making decisions as I carve, not beforehand, no longer inhibited by a design, a rule, a straight line, a blueprint. A blueprint demands to be copied, ad so dictates a success or a failure. Again, that's the way the world works, and that's the way the world wants us to work.

Blueprints are great for building skyscrapers.

But the life blueprint I may have made yesterday, is obsolete, because I am living and changing, and it is not.

It wasn't intentional, but society has placed constraints on itself that have consequently and incidentally slammed shut some very important channels, connections, nodes that are there to keep mind and body healthy..........Happy!

Of course, I'm out of my comfort zone in a whole new territory here.

It's the change in the cerebral landscape. It's a house I own, but forgot about.

I can wander around it, exploring freely, because it's my house.

I can look back at my footprints in the dust, but the front door is open now, slowly blowing that dust away.

I am also not a believer in adhering to what people recognise you for, it's stifling, and simply dictated by the art world in general, believing it to be of financial benefit. It is a manipulation of the potential buyer – the public. They should be given more credit, but they should give themselves more credit first.

"Here's the artist, this is what he does."

But no, it's more like:

"Here's the artist, this is what we say he does."

And the artist agrees because he has to feed himself.

"Here is a man"

"This is how a man should be."

"Here is a woman"

"This is how a woman should be."

Can we please think a bit before we send any similar statements, along with illustrations, into outer space.

It will ensure invasion.

Or have we already done that?

Oh dear.

What's that big saucer doing in the sky.

I'm exploring.

It's a bit scary.

The following words are more specific reasons as to why I'm now making figures.

Nike of Samothrace.

As a secretly troubled boy, my mother took me to Florence.

To show me Michelangelo’s “unfinished" works.

“That's what you are”, she said, alluding to my youth, I suppose.

But I saw a second reason: they were trapped in stone.

Then she took me to Paris.

I stared up at Nike of Samothrace.

Her head was missing, and her arms – but she had wings.

She was alighting onto the prow of a ship.

Triumphant from battle.

I fell in love with her.

So when I grew up I moved to the marble mountains in Italy.

To sculpt figures.

But I could not carve a single one of my feelings.

So I lost myself in abstract work.

I'm not going to attempt to define abstract work here, it is such a loose term that it means almost nothing.

But for me...my abstract is a place outside of human time. A timeless place empty of human objects. A spartan environment designed to encourage the temporary separation – distancing of the mind from the psyche and from the id.

The result into these forays are works that are self-containing, inward-looking. They seem to exist alone, unaware of the viewer.

And I found some kind of peace there that others recognised.

A vindication.

And the joy of sharing with others.

In gardens, rooftops, interiors, foyers, lobbies.

I am proud to have produced this work that comes without baggage.

But thirty years have passed now, and with new evidence, the psyche and the id, who were never that guilty in the first place, deserve parole.

Just lately, I ran out of marble blocks, so with no plan or idea, I began carving an odd-shaped scrap.

And found a figure – my Nike.

And then I began to slowly realise that over the past three decades, day by day, as a human being in a world of them, I had been witnessing, under brave faces, all of us struggle.

And all the while, they have quietly been repairing me.

These figures are created to honour these day-to-day heroes.

With all their merits and weaknesses.

Their frailties.

Their burden of understanding mortality.

Their reckless love.

They are damaged.

They have gained qualities because.

My plan is to fill a large space with them.

Small and life-size works.

A vignette of our condition:

The violence.