Mark, back in 2024, Jenn Ellis curated the Xenia Creative Retreat exhibition, where you participated as an artist-in-residence, showcasing a series of paintings created during your time there. You also participated in the first edition of TERRA in 2023. Now, with ‘lasting echoes’ as your current exhibition with us, how have your artistic explorations evolved over the past year? Could you share what you’re presenting in this new show and how your work has transformed since the Xenia show?

It’s strange because the transformation of my work seems linear, in that over long stretches of time, my work develops slowly and steadily. But also, over shorter stretches, it hops back and forth. I’ll try something new for a month, then revert to older ways of doing things. In the last year some of the work that I’ve not yet shown, tightened up, which I often fight against. These 3 paintings in Lasting Echoes, revert to a looser style, but here I’m trying out a new horizontal format, which I think has a different kind of address. It’s more relaxed. In these works there’s consolidation of previous imagery, along with this new format.

Can you elaborate a bit about the three sibling paintings featured in this show? How does each piece contribute to the overall narrative or conceptual framework? Are there recurring elements, entanglements, or elements of continuity that underscore the idea of them being ‘siblings’ in their interrelation? 

Of course they share a colour palette and a period in which they were made, and a set of dimensions, so this brings them together. But other works made around the same time are very different. These three are bound by a motivation to make quite similar works. It looks like I’ve succeeded and failed at the same time, which I think is important. Colours and forms would float from one canvas onto another, so in the studio they were their own micro climate within a bigger picture. I would say that all of them are ‘emergent’ paintings, in that they developed in a purely improvised manner, with very little preparatory drawing. With painting I always like to cast the net very wide, see what comes in as I paint, then edit out and paint over what doesn’t fit. What I end up with here are works that assemble numerous references together – there’s the vast landscape of Newborough Beach in Anglesey, which always yields imagery, some of it wild and purely imaginary; there’s an older painting ‘frozen lake’, to which all of these works are indebted; they also embrace chance processes, like marbling half way through to disrupt the image, which I think of as in essence Surrealist; they are flat in terms of their spatial recession, which is obviously both Modernist and has a kinship with traditional forms such as Chinese scroll painting or Japanese prints. All together though they present the figure and landscape as one. This isn’t new, but rather a timeless sub-strand of art history. I personally feel that this subject alone touches on existential ideas of being and the passing of time. What there is that’s new to say on such themes is questionable. All that changes maybe is the way we say it. 

We are curious about how you integrate your artistic practice with other creative endeavors, such as curating, writing, or conducting interviews with fellow artists. How do these diverse activities influence and inform one another in your creative work?

Going back to the sibling idea, I have a very close younger brother. We talked constantly growing up, and so I think I developed a dependence on dialogue with others in order to think things through. This is anathema, maybe, to working alone in the studio for days on end. My interviews and writing activities fill this gap. In my recent interview with Richard Aldrich, I felt like we shared many interests. Even though we’re the same age, our practices are also very different, maybe because he came to prominence very early in his career, so his work has a different flavour, but overall maybe a similar attitude. These activities allow me to reach out and connect with others who are not just my local art peer group, which is also very important, but to kindred, shared sensibilities across time and geographies.

Last time we spoke, we discussed how an artist’s workspace can influence their creative process. How does this idea manifest in your own practice? Beside obvious questions of scale, in what ways does your working environment shape your paintings?

For me, because like I said earlier, my works start out very open – anything can happen, so what’s around me often filters into the work whether I realise it at the time or not. So the choice of environment does affect things. The painting here, ‘on newborough sands’ gets its dark green simply from the trees outside my studio window, which happened to chime with some of the pine forest backing that particular beach in Anglesey. But mainly my studio acts as a repository, for colours, imagery, text. And these float around the studio and often get pinned to paintings. The more space, the more flexibility and fluidity with all of this. I’ll give you an example of how this works. Once I needed to paint two thin cotton tape strips for something. So I stapled them to an unused stretcher bar and painted one red and one green. The bar ended up having these racing stripes on it by accident, which I liked and left knocking around. More recently I’ve been painting skiers and the stripes now feature as a design on the skis. In some ways this is meaningless and irrelevant to the final image, but that is typical of how the visual field around me ends up in my paintings. 

What are your aspirations for the coming year, Mark? How do you envision your artistic journey unfolding in 2025, and what direction do you hope to take in both your practice and personal growth?

I’m at the very beginning of a group of new works, so typically the terrain is varied. I’m making more emergent paintings, but also embracing the idea of confusion, so maybe some deliberately confused paintings. I also am working on these skiers, swimmers on the International Dateline, and a series of unfolded human heads that are like maps – each person becomes the whole world – this I think has a very direct link to these 3 paintings here, where the figure becomes the landscape. As you can see it’s messy but exciting and will get more focused as the year develops.