Urban Stories 
2014
Oil on tapestry canvas
Inverted frames
MDF triangular shelving

Rooms in Cold Blood
                                Further investigations in paint
                                Actions beyond the hand yet held within the body…the language of painting is imitated behaviour.
                                                                                 Action coupling
The stuff of nightmares

                                 In the early 1970’s my parents decided that to accommodate our family an additional room was required.
                                 A room would be created in the roof cavity of the bungalow. 

The hole where the window was to be installed had been boarded up with compressed wood board. Although unfinished my brother and I slept in the new bedroom. One night we heard banging on the boarding…it was coming from the outside…we heard someone climbing on the roof above us…it occurred the following night also.

One morning the man dressed in a white boiler suit was kneeling down on a dust sheet in the hall fitting the central heating system. …Through the kitchen doorway Jim the boiler man was visible…this is where my mum, my brother and I were…dad was at work. The back door was open…so to the front door…a man runs into the hallway, he is brandishing an axe…he is here to kill us. I have few memories of events after this…I am aware that Jim (being a big chap) over powered the man…there was screaming…the man ran off. At some point the police found him on a hilltop somewhere I know not where. He had written a letter…this indicated that he had a vision from God…if we were to have a gas central heating boiler installed the thing would blow up…his action to save us was to kill us. The man in question was the builder who was constructing the room. For many years I would succumb to a repeating nightmare…it was the hammering sound.