Animal Magician's Hut - Tracks
Throughout the period of 1989-1991 I produced an abundance of work on paper. It was at this time that I started to think of drawing as an open-ended process by which ideas are generated. Drawing is the means through which someone might engage and ‘digest’ the environment and leave signs of their passing, like an animal leaves tracks in the wild ...
I began to imagine the internal creative engine that ignites the spirit of human beings and that distinguishes us from our animalistic origins. I envisaged the first mythic human being at a precise point in evolution, as if it transformed suddenly from an animal to a miraculous magician.
This ‘humanimal’ transformed the environment around it through wonderful capabilities of mind. It projected ‘spirit vision' upon every element it encountered, so as to reveal every object's inherent quality, as opposed to its mere objective quantity.
Many large- and small-scale drawings describe elemental material forms that are becoming activated by the living force of a first magician’s gaze. The drawings depict the perception of objects in a primal state, undergoing radical upheaval, fluctuating between decay and growth, being shaped into primitive new forms.
I became aware of the materials of art as chaotic, dead stuff, the shape of which I might change with the most basic shifting of thought. 
Many drawings explored the head as a physical container of amorphous thought activity. The transference of thought into the mediums of art and the re-shaping of those mediums into the form of thought seemed like a magical process to me.
I considered the notion of the first brick—the first materialised thought form imposed upon the wild chaotic space surrounding the ‘humanimal’. I imagined this golden brick residing in a state between spirit and matter, still resonant with its own glorious sense of being.
Drawing became a form of externalised thinking, where a type of self-sustaining mechanism is in place. Through working, ideas are generated, which in turn become fuel for more work, and then the process seems to have a mind of its own...
This led me to consider the creative process as a type of mythic battery, and I looked to depict this mythical generator as a subject in the work.
I imagined how the first 'magic battery' started to function in humankind, and I tried to visualise its precise form, as if it existed in a time and place outside the mind.
Explore this theme
1. Introduction
2. Depot Boxes
3. Tracks (You Are Here)
4. Art Battery
5. Puma Search
