In this interview John Bunker set out to examine work that historically preceded and forged my current poured/graphic stencil paintings. The particular paintings in question were my very early 90’s works (with arguably different content and contexts than now) and which were known as the ‘cake’ or ‘stack’ paintings. Bunker was keen to explore how those paintings came into being and what if any conclusions could be drawn from them now and how they may have they impacted on my current thinking?

I explained that whilst still an MA student at Goldsmiths In 1990 I was characterising the then prevalent struggle with the painted medium as an "obsessive questioning of how painting’s contemporaneity relied on but fought against its daunting history. In short, we found ourselves burdened with the dominant trend of the day, which stated that we were at the end of history and that painting was dead. We gradually recognized the limitations of the theories of the ‘death of painting’ (as theories) and sought ways to reconfigure painting."

I argued that back then I was 'reconfiguring painting' by looking critically at paintings’ modernist and post-modern past. In a climate in which Frederick Jameson asserted that 'If the experience and ideology of the unique self… is over and done with, then it is no longer clear what the artists and writers of the present period are supposed to be doing’. I answered this challenge by developing a new kind of agency for painting practice that acknowledged the extent to which subjectivity and the sense of self were mediated by language, ideology, by institutions, and arguably, by the stupefying effects of Late Capitalism’s all-pervasive deployment of ‘the image,’ whilst ensuring that the work remained sumptuous, energetic, seductive and engaging to the curious eye.

The ‘stacked’ or layered ‘cake’ paintings resembled a real cake in terms of depth and sculptural size. They were a foot square and up to five layers deep (a serial reference to Minimalism). I squeezed oil paint through cake decorating equipment whilst the stretched canvases were laid on the floor in a row and repeated the same patterns across each canvas. While the paint was still wet the canvases were laid one on top of another in the fashion of a layered cake. The paint would ooze out of the sides of the stack while the final, front piece remained intact. The resulting 3-dimensional works would then be left to dry for two to three months before being affixed to a gallery wall.

A dialectical tension between the histories of Modernism, with all its high cultural associations was turned by me into a decorative process that belonged to an entirely different realm of popular cultural experience. Making a ‘cake’ was not what was expected of an artist during the so called ‘death of painting’ that was prevalent in the museum and critical artworld of the 1980’s/90’s. I was helped in my decision to make these works because of my academic reading at the time; post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida, Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault etc.

By comparison my paintings now utilise different contexts revolving around painting today although there is still a concern with layering, colour, form and of course a critique of the tropes and inherited, historical language(s) of painting. I argued with Bunker that I’ve found myself in a position where it’s more acceptable to be a neo-formalist painter rather than a solely ironic painter; a painter who juggles, juxtaposes and who agrees to disagree with painting in relation to, rather than as a contrast with, popular cultural concerns and motifs.

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