Review by Mark Cousins:
The relation of the world to this series of work is oblique. It proceeds neither by representation nor by abstraction but by way of the more unlikely category of 'referring', yet what it refers to is not objects but other references. These references make up populations which are distributed in a taxonomic space. But for all this, the experience of the work is anything but abstract. The taxonomic elements, the lists of birds, the collaged elements of travel, are manifested as collections which gradually acquire their own spaces and which struggle into paint.
In the early 'Stay These Couriers' series the painted surfaces are seen to derive mechanically from a series of lines whose mapping then produces a complex geometry of spaces through colour, without losing the formal marks of translation. The subsequent 'collages' shown here begin to produce other spaces as if particular distributions of signs which become figures on a largely white ground, then become through the ground's complex contouring, particular sites - a signscape. These works bed the layer of references into a complex surface in which the reading of space is both spatially and conceptually ambiguous. By the end the work synthesises itself into three panels, 'Flag' paintings, which look like paintings, where perhaps, the references have migrated into painting.
Two points strike me. The work insists that the abstract diagrammatic representation of populations or of taxonomies is always in fact concrete. We remember this particular map or that particular table of elements. It is these that we remember when we also remember the objects which fall within their reference. Secondly, the flight of birds is inescapable as a condition of this series - the bird, not as an image or as an object, but almost as a point of view for the work. In fact the work could as well be hung 'horizontally' and read from above, a flightscape.
Mark Cousins (London, April 2000)