My Home is My City: the Studio

I live in the corner flat of Frobisher Crescent above the Barbican Centre. My studio is my home. It expands beyond its (mostly glass) walls to incorporate the sense that my “home is the entire city” (inspired by photographer Kyoichi Tsukzuki’s description of Tokyo). Equally, the city is my home. When my first work was exhibited and sold at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2017, the RA ran a feature on their website attached to the show featuring artists and their studios but the artists chosen did not have regular studios. One artist worked under the sea! I was featured sitting on my balcony painting overlooking the city. This is my studio: fresh air, gale force winds (often) and a tight space. It’s no wonder my works are small and taped down well! The works on this page are inspired by my south facing balcony view over the Barbican Roof and towards St Giles, St Pauls and the modern and post-modern City buildings (125 London Wall, 1 London Wall, 140 London Wall, 200 Aldersgate). I rarely see people in this view - builders on the roof or down on St Gile's Terrace (see the webpage entitled "Barbican Centre Roof" for these works) but I do see seagulls and pigeons and the latter in particular occasionally sit nicely for me. These works explore a number of themes: through torn fragments of recycled, reversed palette papers, representing our memories, the palimpsest of London ancient and new is reflected and layered with new paint and questions emerge about our past and present. My process is in a constant state of salvaging, reutilising and re-emerging, raising questions about the extent to which we preserve the past in a modern, diverse world. The palette papers draw attention to a dialogue between secular and religious forms on our skyline. What do we choose to preserve and why? Will all this recycling alleviate anxiety about our future? Through this tangible reconstruction, I explore ideas about individual rights to the city and the way in which we can all carve out enjoyment of urban spaces even, and especially without possessing proprietary rights. The torn recycled fragments stimulate a debate about how we are all responsible for the fragments of the city where we work and live because “our home is the entire city”.