When Grayson Perry delivered his 2013 Reith Lectures he said he would tell us the truth about the art world. He told us the things the “art world” tells about itself, with the virtue signalling and pretensions that great art changes the world or introduces us mortals to a glimpse at divine beauty. But, he argued, that such tastes are also a Goffman style performance. Face work. A declaration to be cool and in-the-know and an insider. The quality of artists and their work is a social agreement between the brokers and gatekeepers of the art establishment who are, surprise surprise, not very neutral. 

Perry's central proposition was simple. Art, he suggested, acquires cultural credibility through a set of rituals: the white cube gallery, the critical essay, the art fair, the biennial circuit. These look like systems of evaluation but function more like systems of legitimation, or reification. A self referential loop of people saying “well if they think its good, it must be good”. 

There are two paintings by Van Gogh that I love. The first is pretty iconic, one that you will probably be able to visualise straight away. Van Gogh’s Chair is a simple, plain wooden seat, straw-bottomed, sitting empty on terracotta tiles in a yellow room. It is striking and forlorn and wistful all at the same time and on the seat, his pipe and a pouch of tobacco.

The second painting is Paul Gauguin’s Chair which was done as the first Chair's companion piece at exactly the same time, in December 1888. 

Communicate, Conceive, Connect - What Comes Next?

Communicate, Conceive, Connect was the vision of Sára Irlanda, a midwife who now works at NHS Grampian, who had the idea and the drive to make the exhibition a reality. She was joined by artist Anna Winberg and by me. What we made together was not a straightforward exhibition of artwork. It was an argument made in objects, installations, and images that parenthood is a developmentally vulnerable time, that becoming a parent involves a complex negotiation of identity and relationship and loss, and that these experiences are too often unspoken, unseen, and unsupported.

Nnena Kalu, the Turner Prize, and What It Means for Disabled Artists

In December 2025, something happened in British art that felt genuinely historic. Nnena Kalu is a 59-year-old sculptor who makes vast, cocoon-like hanging structures from VHS tape, masking tape, clingfilm, and cardboard tubing. She has became the first artist with a learning disability to win the Turner Prize since its inception in 1984. She beat three other shortlisted artists at a ceremony in Bradford last year.

The estimated number of children and babies killed in Gaza over the course of the genocidal war is (or at least was when I began this project) 20,000 . Twenty thousand lives. Twenty thousand futures. A number so large it inevitably becomes abstract, a faceless statistic.

The Vertex Project is my attempt to undo that abstraction.

The studio is a shed.

Tucked away in the Highlands, it is a crowded, organised chaos of tools, materials, and works-in-progress that reflects the breadth and physicality of the practice that happens inside it. Handsaws, clamps, chisels, and power tools line the walls alongside paint, glazes, and canvases. A belt sander sits ready. Ceramic baby heads form a crowd or audience and interact with each other in spontaneous stories.