Archive / Repetitions

Milloonnium Bugs

Milloonnium Bugs was made at the end of the twentieth century, during a period when the approaching millennium seemed to encourage both optimism and anxiety in equal measure. The title is a play on words: the Y2K "millennium bug", but also the things that bugged me about humanity. It reflects that peculiar moment of fin du globism, when cultures seem drawn towards apocalyptic thinking. The fear of the Millennium Bug, environmental catastrophe, religious extremism and the general "party like it's 1999" mentality all became part of the atmosphere. I found it both amusing and unsettling, and willingly allowed myself to become caught up in that collective sense of anticipation. There is a line in a Devo song: "It takes a worried man to sing a worried song." At the time, that seemed an appropriate description of the mood.

Apes touches on environmental anxiety. Families of chimpanzees huddle together in a landscape apparently consumed by fire. Yet the flames are not painted literally. They are constructed from loose washes and splashes of yellow, brown and red. To someone who is colour-blind, the same image might read not as fire at all, but simply as dense jungle. The painting deliberately occupies that uncertain space between paradise and catastrophe.

Camel Jam imagines rows of Arab nomads trapped in a desert traffic jam. The absurdity of the idea was part of the humour. Above them stretches a deep black sky filled with stars. Those stars are not carefully painted but are the result of deliberately leaving tiny particles of unmixed white pigment suspended within acrylic medium. Layers of black paint were applied over the surface before being sanded back to reveal the white flecks beneath. Even today, touching the painting leaves faint chalky streaks across the surface, like shooting stars.

Fire Works is not about fireworks. The title asks a question: fire works... for what? To warm cold hands? To cook food? To destroy? Rows of rockets point towards the sky, each decorated with a skeletal figure wrapped in a red shroud, while heavy snow falls around them. They might be waiting for a New Year's Eve celebration, or they might be ballistic missiles waiting for the millennium clock to strike midnight, triggering the imagined computer failures that so many people feared.

Looking back, these paintings capture a very particular historical moment. They are less about predicting the future than about observing the stories societies tell themselves at moments of transition. They reflect a period when humour, anxiety, politics and popular culture became strangely entangled, revealing both our imagination and our capacity for collective unease.