I can’t share much about this one. It is a private manifesto that has to be lived by me, and maybe in a year I can share what it means even in a more formal setting like this but for now it feels too exposing. I am an open person, but when it comes to this, sharing is humiliation. I would much more happily divert attention away to something an outsider might find much more obviously humiliating like the fact that last week I went to a yoga class and I was late, and people were laughing at the school teacher tone that the scrawny man leading the class took with me about my lateness which made me breathy and made me forget that I didn’t have shorts on under my tracksuit bottoms, so I dropped them to just my pants in front of everyone see I’m doing it now. Humiliation is far more interesting than aspiration. I know this by publishing this work and saying it is an important goal for me and yet not telling you what it is. Imagine a time in the future where this is the last piece of work on my website and then people would think that he definitely didn’t get what he was after, and they couldn’t even be soothed by the idea of an intention. I would be hairless then. The easiest way I can describe what this is about is to talk about my real superstition about saying the word “wish” when referring to something that I want. It is quite a mathematical thought, I don’t actually think that changing vocabulary like this affects anything, but if there is a divinity or even a genie-like figure pulling the strings then I’m cashing my chips to ensure that all my good will doesn’t go into the something inconsequential like it being warmer when I’m out. I like to use “hope” instead, even to the point of outwardly rephrasing a sentence if I end up clumsy with my words. “Wish” to me accepts a degree of externally given certainty which I don’t like, I want to have to put effort into things and accept some nuance that they could go wrong, just as another unexpected thing could go right. “Hope” means that I am willing to put the work to make the thing nice, it assumes agency and feels more vulnerable as a way to express desire. That is the most I can share in terms of meaning. I won’t share anything else because the ending is more important anyway. Not in a way that I would want people to guess, but in a way that sometimes I will eat a huge oily pizza and not tell anyone because I know that it is what I need, but an outside observer might have crinkles of judgement which could cloud my enjoyment, it is fickle. The best thing about eating big oily pizzas is the revelry in that disgust anyway, rather than the baked energy the carbs might give you. I have lots of places to get one near me now and they all like to advertise sizing and pricing because the taste doesn’t matter it is the excess. I walked back home with one the other day and the box was warm and lightly ribbed and it felt like running your hands along a radiator, electric heat. I ate it downstairs because it was late and no one would see me regardless and I couldn’t finish it so I hid the three remaining slices to eat cold in the morning which is the best bit because then it is even less like food. That enjoyment is the process and a functioning man is the outcome, and that is why it is better that you don’t hear about the Whale because you can hopefully see it soon. Those close might even get to see the pizza box hanging out of the recycling.

In terms of process which I can speak to, perhaps my favourite bit of the making is picking out the exact piece of material to use for my work, this one was very specific. Most people use treated white canvas because it is so blank, that you can choose exactly what to do with it, but I like being tamed by my baselines. Robert Motherwell wrote that he needed to dirty canvases before restoring “an equivalent of the original clarity […] that one began on”. I see my process slightly differently, by using previously worn pieces of fabric as a base, I attempt to extend their own clarity through my lens. This piece of material is so worn and black, that those marks are sometimes seen through the blue which I like. It adds to the depth of the changing colours of the paint, which I hope comes through on the photo. I cut the material so that the square patch would be where an eye could conceivably be (the patch is opened to the original distress it was trying to conceal and has a web of thread nested inside it), and made it so that the red bar covered the whole top of the piece. I was looking at old freak show posters which is why I chose the red bar, it is meant to be cartoonish and silly, stupid thick marker, stupid thick letters, can’t even be centred. The white lines on the bottom were painted onto a piece of card underneath the fabric, and then drawn through with my fingers whilst the fabric was wet. The rest was painted normally, acrylic with staggered degrees of flow medium.