Artist Statement I: Gathering and Reusing

Summary

I began to make wooden painted cut-outs in London around 1976 for a new restaurant in Covent Garden called Tuttons, having seen dozens of fabulous, badly painted, battered, smiling cut-out waiters careering out from remote village cafés into the dusty roads across Morocco earlier the same year. Since then I’ve probably made around 250; they can usually be described as history paintings, political cartoons or sometimes stand-ins for lost family members.

In the very early 1980s, the fabrication and exhibiting of my somewhat bitingly satirical, life-sized, cut-out men with metre-long penises propelled me into being part of the development of what became Black Art. Each of the characters was a rather self-assured white man clutching a symbol of power and superiority. There were five altogether: It's All in Your Head, Man, Dog Man, David, Family Man and Business Man.

The first of these, It's All in Your Head, Man, was the epitome of the aggressive, rape-happy, warmongering, earth-destroying superhero so beloved of the period. He was covered in furious, shouting text, and his soft, long penis wrapped its way around his body, expelling everything that angered me about the power and status of men at the time. The piece didn’t seem all that extreme to me and simply reflected the sense of injustice that I was feeling and that infiltrated my everyday life as a part-time youth worker, ex-waitress, unsuccessful theatre designer, yet determined political activist.

In the making of David, I focused my fury on the artists and art historians who were woven into the very fabric of the art world as I understood it then. In the creating of Dog Man I simply had to look out of the window at the proliferation of young men who used their animals as weapons to frighten each other and every passer-by into staring determinedly at the pavement; they wore National Front tee-shirts and sprayed the walls with their piss and their graffiti, spreading hatred of everyone Black who had ‘invaded’ their city and their world. Family Man and Business Man were funny but perhaps simple caricatures of the unreconstructed 1980s males who I felt desperately needed a wife and family to make them feel inflated and powerful, or ‘the rest’ who were convinced that capitalism actually worked.