In late August 2020 I travelled with my son Jules to Stirling to accompany him during a 14 day Covid quarantine in a local flat, prior to the beginning of his first year at Stirling University. The flat was bland and spartan with nondescript views of either an empty back street or a carpark. After a few days, with cabin fever setting in, I suggested we take it in turn to take a polaroid a day of anything in the flat – each other, objects, shadows – whatever. The daily ritual became much like drawing notches on the wall to record the passage of time.
I loved the resulting snaps, a beautiful and intriguing motley collection of details and polaroid colours that told its own story in an enigmatic way. They gathered dust for a few years as I struggled to find a way to incorporate them in my work flow. After several drawing and painting attempts, I realised I was only observing them with a literal eye, ie was effectively drawing a pile of snaps. What I was actually looking for was possibly hidden from the naked eye.
To unblock myself, I decided I had no choice but to imagine them as something foreign, something I’d never seen before, possibly from the perspective of an archeologist way in the future when maybe the concept of photography has long since disappeared. I started to imagine that maybe they were something more organic, possibly from the natural world, – a tricky task to unknow something.
This is when I stumbled upon a Paddle plant, a plant I walked past everyday on my way to the studio. This plant seemed the ideal candidate for inspiration, with its lack of symmetry and cluster of leaves expressing personal histories. After several studies I moved onto clusters of other objects including, new potatoes, my son’s old shoes and a dried log with dead Turkeytail fungi – each time trying to unknow what I was observing.
This series of small paintings is what happened next, a return to the polaroids themselves but this time attempting to avoid a literal translation and trying to represent memory as a construction of many fragments, pooled together by this loom in our head which weaves a different image every time we visit the same memory, in this case, 14 polaroids taken by my son and I in quarantine.

Image 01 – Q Polaroïds – 14 polaroids alternately taken by my son, Jules and I, during our 14 day Covid quarantine in a flat in Stirling, Scotland, 27/08/20 – 09/09/20

Image 02 – Sketchbook drawing

Image 03 – ‘Q Polaroïds 12:32pm 16/03/23′ 30cm x 30cm -oils, inks, & crayon on cotton paper 300g/m2

Image 04 – ‘Q Polaroïds 17:15pm 16/03/23′ 30cm x 30cm -oils, inks, & crayon on cotton paper 300g/m2

Image 05 – ‘Q Polaroïds 15:23pm 16/03/23′ 30cm x 30cm -oils, inks, & crayon on cotton paper 300g/m2

Image 06 – ‘Q Polaroïds 13:59pm 22/03/23′ 30cm x 30cm -oils, inks, & crayon on cotton paper 300g/m2

Image 07 – ‘Q Polaroïds 11:43pm 23/03/23′ 30cm x 30cm -oils, inks, & crayon on cotton paper 300g/m2

Image 08 – ‘Q Polaroïds’ WIP painting using porcelain slip on plywood