But it's all well and good stopping for a chat when I buy the Big Issue. Isn't it more urgent to address the societal conditions that enable homelessness and poverty to persist, both here in the UK and beyond, which look set to worsen over the coming years? Well yes, and that's covered by the manifesto too. I have long been convinced that all artwork is political, because being an artist is to take a political position. It stakes a claim on our time and resources and puts them to use for a mainly non-commercial end. Artists are either complicit with the current systems of power and distribution of resources, both within the art-world and the 'real' world, globally and locally, or they are agitating for change. As we are learning from the Black Lives Matter movement, silence is violence.
The status quo is not working. Society is set up with an unsustainable dependency on growth, which enriches a tiny number while oppressing and exploiting huge numbers of people and trashing, negligently, the biosphere that keeps us all alive. Inequalities of wealth and opportunity, corruption and greed blight our societies. Fear and hatred of 'the other' are manipulated by power-seeking people to keep the population feeling divided and powerless. In my experience of the UK, we are a more divided society now than ever before in my lifetime.
I take a position against ignorance, against exploitation, and for the human. I don't subscribe to misanthropic, malthusian tropes about humans being the virus infecting the planet. I believe a better, fairer, sustainable world is possible, that the global population of humans is stabilising, and that there are sufficient resources for everyone if we use them fairly. Life is a constant shifting of the balance between species and habitats and nothing we do will bring about the global harmony we might imagine, if we're hoping for stasis. Change is one of the constant factors of the natural world. So let my artwork express life and change in all its ridiculous complexity. Let it confront prejudice and abuse of power. Let it present love and generosity, in opposition to fear and mean-spiritedness. Let it appear foolish and mischievous as it punches you, gently, on the nose. Let it dive into the world as a journeying pilgrim, discovering its overlooked corners and bringing you along for the journey.
If those are the heady reveries of my worldview and values, what are the specific issues I'm grappling with as an artist? My job as an artist is to create work, and more work, and more work that expresses my values and experience. For me, it starts with drawing and ideas in equal measure. These are necessary ingredients but not outcomes in themselves. I enjoy the hand-made and analogue qualities of woodcut printing, and it's distributive potential. And my time-based, durational walking practice is at the core of what I do. I hope there is a sense of love and generosity embedded in all that I do, even when it involves a provocation or rebuke - but I am seeking the grit that creates the pearl that I can pass on to an audience. I want the work to embody my values in a way that can transport people to a transformational experience.
I am aware looking back over my work that it has sometimes tended towards the safe and familiar, the birds and the trees, without any of the transformational grit I want to communicate. The poetics and mischief of a performative practice should never feel safe and familiar, it should be unsettling and discombobulating. So I will focus on the work that asks questions and provokes responses. I will avoid the comfort zone of making nice prints of pretty scenes. I will aim to connect my core values into my practice as an authentic expression of myself, including the contrasts of light and dark. For me, that will always involve supporting and promoting the work of other artists, whose work I love and who are on similar journeys.
Questioning my practice online in this way feels like quite a vulnerable position to take - but that is also part of my job. My practice is a process of constant trial and error working out these issues from different angles, using different media, surprising people with incongruities that may challenge their unexamined beliefs (as well as my own).
