I was born in 1959 in Nantyglo, Monmouthshire, Wales, and lived in Abertillery, in that county, until 1977. My undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Fine Art and Art History were undertaken, first, at Gwent College of Higher Education (1977–81) and, afterwards, at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth (1982-4, 1986–91). There I was taught by, among others: the conceptualist Keith Arnatt (1930–2008); cybernetics artist and theoretician Roy Ascott (b. 1934); the artist and art historian Ivor Davies (b. 1935); the systems artist Keith Richardson-Jones (1925–2005); and the painters Jack Crabtree (b. 1938), John Selway (1938–2017), David Tinker (1924–2000), and Ernest Zobole (1927–1999).
From the early 1980s to the mid 1990s, my art practice brought together the imagery of schematics, electronics, mechanisms, hieroglyphs, and post-industrial landscape. The work espoused a form of visual polyglotism. It attempted to fuse visual languages and gather opposing tendencies: drawing and painting; construction and illusion; abstraction and figuration; minimalist and maximalist preoccupations; and academic and modernist techniques. During this period, I became increasingly interested in art historical study as a complementary activity, and began to explore the visual expression of religious belief, and Protestantism in particular.
Since the mid 1990s, I have sought to forge a reciprocal relation between his study of the visual culture of religion and my art practice. I regard my art historical research and image and sound making as, increasingly, articulations or manifestations of the same preoccupations. In my writing I have explored: the relationship between the text, image, and sound; the process of translation from the literary to the visual and sonorous; and the concept of images (visual and sonic) as repositories of belief, expressions of religio-cultural identity, vehicles for theological reflection, and modes of interpretation.
In 2010, I re-engaged my interest in experimental sound and music composition, which I had put aside in 1977. My sonic articulations involve processes, systems, and semantic content suggested by biblical texts (either written or spoken) and the Protestant culture of preaching, exegesis, teaching, and worship.
My image and sound making are, likewise, an academic inquiry — a mode of textual (scriptural) analysis, exegesis, and hermeneutical inquiry, responsively informed by personal contemplation and research conducted in the fields of Biblical Studies, Religious Studies, and Theology. The works aim to illuminate the Bible and its cultural expressions, not so much in the traditional sense of adorning or decorating the text as in making it enlightening and explicable, either visibly or audibly. Consequently, they are artefacts derived from reflection rather than intended for adoration.
I live and work in Aberystwyth, Wales.