“I seem to have settled on the dental headrest as an object that connects with a memory of being anaesthetised with laughing gas at the dentist in the 1960’s. I remember the mask and counting and a very languid drift into oblivion. Something otherworldly…

I remember being led out of the room by my mother feeling as if something fundamental had changed. Going down the staircase to the street was perilous as I felt rubbery legged and kind of seasick. The space of the stairwell seemed fluid, elastic in dimension. I gradually recovered in the car on the journey home.

I guess I was maybe eight. I don’t know whether to thank the dentist for expanding my consciousness and revealing the slippery nature of reality, or to blame him for my ongoing fascination for intoxication and its downsides.

I’m experimenting with a suspended anvil hanging by a thread, something to do with weight and torpor; and balancing that against the support of the headrest on the surveyor’s tripod. I may use magnets and iron powder with the anvil or the headrest to denote invisible energies. I may cover the entire tripod with black glue gun glue to suggest a more fluid and organic feel.

So apologies for the stream of consciousness writing, my thoughts are rarely organised, my work kind of occurs to me organically, ideas race like domino runs, forking and hitting blind alleys but somehow usually moving forward, surprising me with their resolution.”

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