I’m not a person to whom the pursuit of leisure, in and of itself, appeals. Its not something I’ve grown up with and it’s not something that makes sense to me. In South Africa my mother reminded me that I was somewhere where people go on holiday, in a place where it doesn’t rain for a week, in a place where you don’t play lacrosse or have an Aga. Getting milk from a cow down the road or looking at the river flooding was special enough (our expiditions), and it is something I cherish. Very beautiful and very alone.

In between occupying myself, as pragmatic children do, I picked up vignettes of the holidaymakers whose purchases (my parents made and sold pottery at craft markets) decided whether or not we would have a tight month.  Driving too fast or two slow, dreadfully sunburnt or translucently pale, and always carrying some cryptic assortment of bags: I loved watching how these people were so out of place but yet totally at ease. Determined to possess or be possessed by a new land.

These works are a facsimile of other people’s holidays. They aren’t as much about the idea of relating to a subject but about the bittersweet voyeurism one indulges in when looking at someone else’s holiday photos (or god forbid, slides). These strangers, whether in groups or alone, or not depicted at all, form succinct units: replete in the knowledge that they are somewhere new.

I have played with a tension between narrative and autobiography: I enjoy employing painting as an extension of a literary form; I’m a simple man who likes pictures. I’m a cuckoo with a warped sense of linear time, I’ve taken stories and pictures (imagined and real) from people around me to consolidate my own sense of holidays through what I’ve left out.

Expeditions was on show at Koop Projects as part of Calls to Mind in Brighton, July-August 2022.