Archive / Repetitions

The Burbs

The Burbs (suburbs) was the final painting I made in the Repetitions series. It wasn't a conclusion, but the closing of a particular chapter. By this point, through testing and repetition, I was making paintings built almost entirely from transferred images, including the repeated motifs themselves. They had become increasingly complex and labour-intensive. I still enjoyed making them, but they had lost some of the immediacy and spontaneity of the earlier collages.

My world had changed too. I was studying for an MA at Sheffield Hallam University and was being introduced to new ideas, new ways of thinking and opportunities that sat well beyond the commercial side of my practice. The work no longer felt contained within the canvas or the frame of the gallery wall. I found myself drifting towards installation and sculpture, and was increasingly being invited to take part in exhibitions that demanded a more conceptual approach. In many ways my practice was returning to the openness and experimentation that had characterised my BA.

Perhaps "light-hearted" is the wrong expression. The world itself felt anything but light. In the years following 9/11 everything seemed overshadowed by conflict and uncertainty.

The Burbs reflects on an earlier period of my life: my first house on a modern housing estate in a former mining village near Rotherham, my years working in construction, diving and beginning family life. The painting is not nostalgic. Instead, it presents a landscape of repetition, conformity and quiet social expectation, while storm clouds gather overhead. Looking back, it became a painting about recognising that it was time to move on—leaving both the past and the present behind, and allowing the next stage of my practice to emerge.