I tend to view projects I am occupied with as related to one another. The past is inscribed in the present, in materials, in people, in objects. Record making activities (photo, sound recording) may be a means to engage with that.
Spruce is a material I work with a lot (it is used for soundboards of stringed instruments ). It is a case in point: it is itself a trace of time past, a record of the off-axis rotation of the Earth as the seasons fashion yearly its variation in density, it is also a record of the weather variation from year to year, and, inscribed within its properties as a sounding material are some of the properties of the living tree: the elasticity across the grain and extraordinary strength along it.
Born in 1957, Paris. I have worked as a professional violin maker / restorer – as a main activity – since my late teens. I have lived in Oxford UK since 1982. I also play music and make images (photographs and paintings)
Photo work /exhibitions:
# Joint exhibition with photographer Paul Medley ‘Imageries 2+2’ – Magdalen Road Studios Oxford – April 2024
# Joint exhibition with ceramicist Aline Stanway – Private Gallery Oxford May 2019
# Artweeks – Oxford joint exhibitions (several since 2008)
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“I am watching this man who is motionless in sleep and suddenly he wakes. He opens his eyes. He makes a move toward his hat, which has fallen beside him, and picks it up to protect himself from the sun.
The experience that I make out of my hold on the world is what makes me capable of perceiving another myself, provided that in the interior of my world there opens up a gesture resembling my own. The moment the man wakes up in the sun and reaches for his hat, between the sun which burns me and makes my eyes squint and the gesture which from a distance over there brings relief to my fatigue, a bond is tied without my needing to decide anything.
As long as it adheres to my body, the world exists not only for me but for everyone in it who makes gestures toward it. There is a universality of feeling—and it is upon this that our identification rests, the generalization of my body, the perception of the other.”
(extracts from M. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘The prose of the world” – translated by John O’Neill, published 1973).
Trace of space 