What first set me off on this road was my encounters with conceptual art as a student in the 1970s. I saw artists working with pictures in sequences. In the drawings I was interested not in the mimetic qualities of the drawing as an end in themselves but rather in how these drawings could be used to pull the viewer through a series of associations into some kind of revision of their mental maps......I am not completely clear what I mean by that, because i dont think that art/work can ever successfully articulate any kind of higher agenda which is separate from itself.........anyhow, the books were a way that I could work with different kinds of material (photographic, drawn, written) and bridge various kinds of ontologically different things, I am not sure that's the right word. I mean things having a different kind of reality. The material objects (the book and what it is physically made of) and drawings, photographs, words and shapes which work through mimesis and symbolism. Creating a play of meaning within a larger sculptural object. I wanted to retain a feeling of informality and casualness which would suggest the processes through which the book was created. What, at the beginning were a series of drawings, evolved into books. I was making order and structure, but it was important that people would see the joins, so I was using a DIY aesthetic to build a distinctive form for these books. After a number of experiments with binding, I began to work with paper clips creating bindings that were physically strong and which reflected my own doubts about the idea of definitive form. I took great care that my constructions would work in the same way as any other book. It was important to me that the pages turned easily and that the book would close to form a flat block........So I was happy with this way of binding and I wanted to use it to make a sort of high end comic. I liked the graphic and architypal aspects of comics but i wasnt very interested in most of the storylines. So i started experimenting with creating a storyline by just collaging images and then editing them. It was like the thing was in this in a state of flux where it never completely arrived at a definitive version.... I just called it the Price of Admission because a reoccuring preoccupation was the idea of admission into a social group. Nowadays there is facebook, in the 80s there were clubs with door policies. So i was thinking about editing in social terms as well as in terms of including or omitting material.

When I am making a book I am very conscious of the act of editing. Making this editing visible and bringing this process into the foreground is one of the principles which I used when I was making my book The Price of Admission. Its a comic about how to go about making a comic. But when you start to enter a fantasy identification with the characters and situations you are literally disillusioned by the clunky material reality of the thing itself .(the book, the page) Design and binding are envisaged as a whole. The book is designed using paper clips. The idea is that it should function like any other book, pages turn easily and it closes to form a block. This the photograph to the right shows version 6 in a series of books entitled ' The Price of Admission'. Each version stands as a work in its own right. What all versions share are common design principles and thematic ideas. By using paper clips as a structural element the work suggests the idea of creating and editing a collection, in this case a series of panels in the style of a comic, with a cast of 'characters'. These panels form a group of sequences built around the idea of admission. ( in its various senses

For this project I am like a film maker who remakes one film again and again. OK, it's basically a series of still panels, more like a storyboard than a film! But remaking exactly the same storyboard/film is virtually impossible, this isn't simply a problem of accurately redrawing the same drawings, because what happens is I change and my relationship to the material changes. I change because of the obvious reasons like ageing and new influences in my life, but also because the process of making one of these books changes me. So when I make the next one the material appears to me in a different light. The material seems to always be in flux. Early on in the project I had the idea to fix it in the form of a book using relief prints and photographs and to make an edition. Although I made several copies using this method, each was different from the other and I realise that for me every 'finished' form was only a starting point for doing it again.

I begin with piles of drawings and notes, which I then work through, edit and organise until I arrive at something that looks like coherence to me. Sometimes this coherence resembles a narrative sequence. These affinities emerge from the process of making the work and I enjoy the proces most when they emerge and surprise me, as though I have uncovered them, rather than consciously constructing them.

When I was making the different versions of the "The Price of Admission" I was very conscious of a sense of inadequacy, inadequacy in the drawings inadequacy and the words and even in the concept. Somehow I had a sense that everything was falling short of some ideal of economical visual compression. This is falling short might be a goofy expression, or an embarrassing or too revealing phrase or it might be some flaw or blemish on the paper clumsy piece of drawing or a piece of drawing that seems to facile or generalised. AndThere was always a sense that this thing fell short of a sort of some ideal form of itself. This sense of unease is integral to the whole work. This is the reason for the two vertical strips on either side of the main page. These are a space in which I recorded my own reactions and observations about what I was making. Some sense of dissatisfaction and frustration is what I wanted to capture. In this process I am making critical decisions about the next version of the book, trying to work towards defining the criteria for inclusion of an "item" and then to define whether the "item" works on a formal level. My idea is that these assessments and judgements, which I am making visible within the work, are part of the material from which the work is created.

When I conceived of the idea of making 10 versions of the same book, I thought of it as improving and refining what I was doing from one book to the next, but while some versions may be drawn more economy or vigour then others, all of them are only what they are. Their existence as material objects made from paper, canvas, acrylic, graphite, etc, etc, demands attention for what it is, as well as what it is not.