In 2007 we made a decision to work collaboratively and to exhibit as a permanent joint identity. This followed independent careers as artists since the mid 1970s. Our collaborative work is based on a combination of our separate skills and inspirations, but the result is fundamentally new and surprising.

All our current work has been produced by casting epoxy resin from wooden panels measuring up to 2.5m x 1.5m. Colours are cast in sequence, and the final image is a reverse of the original application, in a similar way to a traditional block print. Some of the works are then partially painted in oil or acrylic, while others are exhibited as virgin casts. In parallel to printing, several variations or versions of an image can be produced from one block. We enjoy the quality that a print or cast takes on as a result of the accumulation and overlaying of actions. This suits the collaborative process by allowing one ‘statement’ to be superimposed over another. The outcome is simultaneously controlled and unpredictable.

Our paintings appear at first sight to be ‘abstract’, but are actually based on a definite location or object. Many of the paintings derive from urban landscape features from the midlands ‘new towns’; others derive from routes and plans in our daily life. We are interested in the way that real places have a ‘paper history’. Roads, public spaces and buildings were first conceived on the computer screens or drawing boards of planning departments and architects’ offices before becoming ‘actual’. As a result the original graph-paper geometry, although suppressed, is transferred to real life as a ghostly presence. Our paintings attempt to reverse the process by resurrecting the geometry from the landscape view.

The borders of the composition correspond to a specific section of landscape, rather than to a rectangular frame, and so the wall flows into the composition and provides an extension to the work. An example of this is ‘Garden Islands’, which is one of the paintings featured on this website. The ‘islands’ are grass banks and flower beds that divide the entrances, exits and parking areas of a station concourse. They are cast as an ‘ensemble’ – i.e. a set of diagrammatic shapes, as though lifted from an imaginary octagonal grid. The main exit route can be seen as a curved perspective of space running between the plots to a horizon line above.

The title ‘Garden Islands’ is intended to evoke a reference to the art of historic and contemporary Japan, which is an inspiration to our work.