The paintings, collages, drawings and photographs in this exhibition represent a small part of a speculative investigation that, for me, is carried on across a wide front in association with the manufacture of films, operas and novels. They are sometimes objects used in the construction of a film. Sometimes they exist as evidence to indicate some part of the journey taken to reach a film. They can show evidence of unproductive cul-de-sacs or rejected solutions in a project, or are evidence of solutions ways beyond practicality. Sometimes they demonstrate an extended after thought since its is always difficult for me to leave a film behind. Sometimes a painting, collage or drawing is all that remains of a project that has been entirely abandoned or, more interestingly, is evidence of a project that is still striving to begin. Finally, there are those works that ostensibly refer to themselves - though I can never really believe that that could ever be the case, for nothing exists in such an impossible vacuum.

By the time I was about fourteen or fifteen I had become fascinated by landscape. For me painting was landscape painting. The classic English landscape artists - Wilson, Constable, Gainsborough, Turner, Palmer - were my primary interest. A lot of my very early stuff would be very poor imitations of them.
As soon as you go to art school you realise that England has been more painted, drawn and photographed than perhaps any other place in the entire history of the world. Then you realise that the vocabulary has been used up. How can you portray a landscape without imitating people in the past? The Land art movement of the sixties appeared to offer a way of doing it, one which could be related to my fascination with maps, plans, diagrams and aerial views. So many of the works in this exhibition relate to my attempt to render landscape - as well as stellarscapes - using a modern vocabulary.

The beauty of collage is that the magic of an original page, paper or object can lend life to the finished work. This is something I would have learnt more from the early paintings of R. B. Kitaj than from anybody else. How in one picture space he would collage not only all sorts of different material but also employ five or six different forms of painted or drawn representations on one canvas. Schwitters was a strong personal discovery I made when I was a teenager, but I confess now I find the collages less interesting. I was also encouraged by Rauschenberg's collage techniques, especially in his Dante drawings. I particularly admired Braque's collages, knowing he had an intimate use and knowledge of the house-decorator's vocabulary.
Here is a collaged diptych full of incident, mainly of deep pink and blue and brown which are the colours of the human skin under stress, bruising and the sun - though that is an afterthought. The paint and the colour effortlessly hold the various contents together. If only film could do the same - but we expect content and narrative continuity of film and could never conceive of shape and colour being responsible enough to provide coherence.

I believe in every case my artworks show a wish to order, or a wish to discuss or contemplate order, a desire indeed for structure to accommodate the vast amounts of information that is present in the world.
The two dominant organising structures of universal accessibility are undoubtedly letters and numerals. Their range is very economic. A to Z and 0 to 9. The grid - variable in the ratio of one side to another, but rectangular in essentials - has also proved useful. Into its pictorial discipline much can be stored with clarity and order, and much can be made of the structure itself.
So in my paintings there is a high bias towards the formal - not opposed to content, but a sheer delight in organisation and classification. My paintings, or works on paper, are basically to do with maps, plans, diagrams - schematic organisations of phenomena in one respect or another. In some cases very self-reflexively, so it's just simply about colour squares, and through that about the way that the paint hits the paper, and the conjunction between the two. Such a statement does sound simplistic, but the broad outlines are probably relevant.

As never before - and especially thanks to television - we are now a perpetual universal audience at the events of History. We are spectators at a 24-hours-a-day, never-ending performance apparently constantly interfered with by a deus ex machina of unlimited imagination.
Since it has been said that a definition of a performance is any event witnessed by an audience, and delighting therefore in the axiom that audience and performance need one another as equals, my interest in the audience as 'the performance' has grown.
Just as, increasingly, we are becoming a planet of spectators hungry for performance, we have also become, willingly or unwillingly, a world of spectators being watched - by the voyeuristic surveillance camera, the domestic camera-recorder, the increasingly intrusive mobile public broadcasting unit. Consider the unknowing 'volunteer' extras viewable nightly in every news broadcast. We could ask, "Who has not been filmed?" - and get no show of upraised hands. We are a world of watchers being watched. We are an audience watching ourselves.

Most artists have used themes that have often come to characterise their work. This is usually, I would have thought (at least at first), an unconscious activity - maybe ritualised when sufficient attention has been brought to it by others. The depiction and consideration of flying, water and death by drowning are three such themes for me. All three themes were brought together in some paintings I finished a couple of years ago - in Icarus Falling into Water, for example.
I haven't done any continuous painting for some time now. I've been making a film, directing an opera, supervising installations and creating light shows. I am itching to paint a whole series of works - ideas have been whirling around in my head for a long time now. In my luggage you will find my painting materials - I always carry tubes of acrylic paint around with me. It often leaks onto my shirts, but nevertheless it's there. When the rub finally comes, and the money runs out and nobody wants me to make films any more I would quite happily retire from that whole area of image making and become much more associated with the notion of the mark on the page. In the end I might be just as happy making stains on paper as movies which cost ten million pounds and involve five thousand people.