ARTISTS TALKING

When I was about twelve, my sisters showed me the bullet marks left by the Gestapo in the wall of the Prefecture of Police, Paris. This terrifying trace was the backdrop for a policeman chewing gum to the squeaky toy soundtrack of zebra finches in the nearby bird market – the high drama, the profound moment, sublimated and ignored amongst the everyday.

Embarking upon the Fine Art MA at Central St Martin's I was both relieved and deflated that this puzzling subject was described with art school parlance as 'trace' and had an arsenal of philosophers already at the helm of its cause.

I hoard and accumulate to the point where I incapacitate myself with stuff. Books in my bed, food on my floor, unable to – as I am sure a clinical psychologist would conclude – let go; to live in the present and relinquish control. I have a morbid fear of the movement of time, a desire to slow it down and filter each moment for hidden significance.

Overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I had collected and wanted to paint, I set myself the task of making one six-inch-square painting a day, for a year, to inventory these tatters and traces of other people's existence; lost references, that I would like to make whole again.

At present, with artist Nadia Hebson, I am making an archive of Woodbridge, the town where I live. Our exhibition will document the sometimes ludicrous folklore of the area: from descriptions of how Cromwell's shrunken head was kept on a stick in a rectory and brought out like a grotesque toffee apple for local boy scouts to see; to the tale of how a former mayor nursed an albatross back to health in his hotel swimming pool.

Back in Paris, and the bullet holes send me into a gory fantasy more to do with the chasms in my own life, than the tragedy of the real event.