Bar
During the period that these collages were made I spent quite a bit of time in pubs and bars. It was routine in the large shared artists studio where I worked that at the end of the day someone would announce that it was time for a couple of jars or would take orders for a slab of beer. Strange given artists proclivity for the occasional drink that alcohol is rarely a subject considered worthy of consideration. 'Bar' could be considered as an el cheapo version of Degas' Absinthe Drinkers. I'm quite fond of this picture and it is one of the very few monochrome images that I've done.

Bloc
The major visual element of 'Bloc' is a chopped up woodcut that I had made some years previously. Thematically the woodcut was OK but it was visually dull and I thought why waste it? It represents hours of work and recycling is a good thing plus with a bit of manipulation I might get it to work. The collage works better although there are some misgivings but overall it doesn't have the dryness of the original.
The theme is the corporate destruction of the city business district environment and the visual representation I decided upon were the bland sketches that architects used to sell the concept to the public. You can see the classic mannerisms - bland generic buildings, a gimpy bit of public sculpture in a bleak windswept plaza and a few generic humans to indicate scale.
Whilst working on the image I took a liking to the look of the bits of masking tape temporarily holding the materials in place but was concerned about keeping them because of permanence issues. Metaphorically they suggested the gimcrack nature of these environments so a compromise was to paint little blocks of colour that at a glance could be construed as tape. The term Bloc I borrowed from the now defunct 'East Bloc' used during the cold war, I figured that corporate behaviour can have totalitarian overtones, so why not use it?

Climate
'Climate' is one of several collages I made that deal with the theme of environmental apocalypse. Apocalyptic and dystopian themes became fashionable among artists during the mid 1980's. Even though I felt that a lot of this stuff was unconvincing and cheesy work copied from fine European artists such as Anselm Kiefer I was still fascinated by it. One source of inspiration was the Science Fiction literature that I was reading. Failed societies and environmental catastrophe are favourite themes of writers such as Phillip K Dick and feature in novels such as Angela Carter's 'Heroes and Villains' or Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker'. 'Climate' portrays a man kneeling under a deluge of biblical proportions, the oppressive curtain of rain made from ribbons of lead.

Data
'Data' is about the information landscape, the trees are literally made from strings of text and the heavens feature planets drawn with astrological symbols. I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean but we're talking about a time when computers began to enter the mainstream and I imagined a Marshall McLuhan type of future where information was omnipresent. It's arrived and you're looking at it right now - the Internet.

Drug #1  Drug #2
I've always been interested in recreational drugs from a philosophical point of view as well as getting smashed occasionally. The guy in this picture is on a real bender, the landscape around him is fractured and incoherent, the colours intense and hallucinatory. The background is marbled, and the sinewy figure made from solder wire. Whilst making this picture the wire figure was left unpainted but I felt the effect of the silver on red was visually too violent and consequently smeared it with paint. It was a cop out that I regretted. There was no real reason for 'Drug #2' apart from an interest in frottage (rubbing). And the man's ludicrously extended arms? That idea came from the original 'Nightmare on Elm Street", a film directed by Wes Craven where the psychotic protagonist, Freddy Kruger, in a surreal sequence grows bizarrely elongated limbs.

Ecology #1  Ecology #2
Giving a picture a title such as Ecology suggests an environmental theme but his wasn't something I was overtly concerned about in this case. The title is slightly ironic because my interest was fundamentally about the visual spectacle of people immersed in water and possible metaphoric meanings were secondary. I'll leave it to the viewer to make up their own mind what these pictures mean (as they inevitably will do anyhow) but the aesthetic outcome of 'Ecology #1' with its odd colours, the coarse rendering of the banks next to the finely toned and textured scene in the water I think is less in doubt.

Forest
I would consider 'Forest' to be the least successful collage of this series. It's a good opportunity to explain something about how these pictures were made and what defines their relative success or failure. The panels would first have an abstract background applied without really knowing what direction the picture would take. A figure would be added and at this point ideas about an evolving theme and underlying aesthetic structure would emerge. It was at this critical point that I would have to exercise the greatest control in order to pull it all together, the time for free associating having passed. 'Forest' failed to evolve successfully beyond this point but I liked it enough to preserve it, it has a muted grey green sort of meditative quality about it. If you look carefully you can, with a bit of visualisation, make out a figure immersed in a fog of white noise.

Ghost
I made this picture after being mightily impressed by Guy de Maupassant's horror stories, particularly one that he wrote about a sinister presence infecting a man after a strange foreign ship passed by. The figure bound with wire indicates the possessed man and the cut-out above him suggests a doppelganger or wraith. The black marble in the background was made from the stuff people use to line drawers with and the colours were chosen to impart a sick melancholic mood.

Ice #1  Ice #2
One of the great haunting literary images is of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster on a remote ice floe at the end of that great novel. It is hard to imagine a greater solitude and loneliness and this pretty much sums up the mood of both these collages. 'Ice #2' plays around with the visual conceit of allowing the background to show through what would normally be the shadows or dark tones of the figure, it was a contrivance also used in one of the 'Springtime on Saturn' screen prints but I dumped the technique after these two attempts. 'Ice #1' is slightly more successful and unusual in my work in that the figure takes up a tiny part of the picture field. I also was pleased with the visual economy of this picture, I wish it was something that I could do more often but I think it is one of the more difficult achievements in visual art.
The gridded margin requires some explanation, the grid having no intrinsic meaning per se other than as a visual echo of the repeating elements within the landscape. It is the margin that is a recurring element in all the collages and indeed in the landscape paintings as well. I can't present any specific reason for its use beside liking it as a distancing device, an artifice not unlike the margin of a magazine page that reminds the viewer what they are looking at is fundamentally is information organised on a flat surface.

Nature
'Nature' was made at the same time and for the same reason as the 'Ecology' pictures. It was partly a study in blacks; Mars black, the thick black paper used to pack photo-sensitive materials and the black of India Ink. It was irresistible then to add a vividly coloured patch of marbled paper with the silveriness of the solder wire and the pearl lustre of the stylised lens flare of the moonbeam. It's a contradictory picture containing corniness, a comic book crudeness and a certain lyrical subtlety.

Night
Night is a case where the stream of consciousness style of image making has led to this picture's derailment. Firstly there is the tightly formal element of rigidly applied coloured paper strips, then the totally meaningless plywood cut-out shapes on either side of the picture that only have a partial coherence because the copper strips provide some visual continuity of line work. Laid over this dubious assemblage is a figure casually delineated in lead, painted red lampshades and tiny trompe l'oeil moths. The theme of nighttime evolved only after some of the major visual elements had been established. The lampshades that festoon the central figure was added after I had watched a film based on Herman Hesse' Steppenwolf which has a scene set in a lowly lit restaurant illuminated by a sea of red lampshades. The moths were added because I worked on the picture one hot summer evening and a little pale moth landed on the surface and I thought what is more defining of the notion of night than a moth?

Observer
'Observer', 'Opening' and 'Data' all share the same foreground figure of a man (recycled from the 'Springtime on Saturn' edition of screen prints) who has his back turned to the viewer observing some sort of spectacle. With this practice of re-using bits I admit to a degree of laziness but in defense I would argue that there is much for the artist to learn from working serially and a degree of pleasure to be had by the viewer from comparing and analysing how the repeated elements are subtly re-contextualised. In both these collages and screen prints I was intrigued by the concept of a figure mired in a network of confusing dots and stripes to the degree that the figure is threatened of being swallowed up by the landscape. One component of 'Observer' that pleased me were the lead pieces that once beaten and cut to the same size as the paper strips and folded randomly start to suggest vegetation or some sort of detail in the landscape but the real agenda of this device was the visual counter pointing of foreground/background.

Opening
"I can see the opening, I can see the openinnng" went the lyrics of a song by an early 1980's band Clock DVA. It was sung in a mournful anguished style and I'm not entirely clear what it was that singer Addie Newton was escaping from or to but its mood was explicitly dark. My version isn't particularly gloomy although the angled strips of lead are meant to imply rain and the escaping man is peering expectantly at a dark object whose status is uncertain. The idea for the visible rain came from Ando Hiroshige's beautiful woodblock prints.

Space
The source of inspiration for 'Space' was vaguely a William Blake watercolour of a godlike figure in the clouds, however this only became clear after I had placed the cut-out of the man on a field of stenciled dots and had started to sprinkle little jig sawed plywood off cuts over the picture. One really nice aspect of this type of collaging is the openendedness of the technique, that when you are stuck you can shift all sorts of bits and pieces around until an idea begins to gel and then you start to exercise a bit of discipline to give that idea shape.

War
This collage was made after fighting had started in the first Gulf War and retreating Iraqi soldiers torched the oil wells which spewed plumes of smoke visible from outer space. The strips of lead suggest a convulsed landscape with smoke billowing towards the heavens where you can see sinister cancerous looking particles. I forgot where the two fighting men came from but I do recall that it was a colour photocopy. The flames were rub on symbols used by graphic designers to indicate flammable substances and the background is heavily stenciled with dots to suggest a turbulent and dangerous environment.