Fear
I think I met artist Jutta Vollmer in 2006. Jutta (and Andreas Vietz) had been invited to to base themselves at Liverpool John Moores University where I was teaching by EIGHTDAYSAWEEK. We've collaborated in many ways since in London, Liverpool and Köln, where Jutta has her print workshop, Kölner Graphikwerkstatt.
In 2019 we exchanged a drawing daily on WhatsApp. We didn’t converse using the images... We were in conversation with ourselves actually, using drawing. The job of the other artist was to bear witness.
At the end of the year I sat on the drawings for a couple of months. Then one day I pulled them out and sorted them into piles quickly without too much thought. There were five piles and the largest was ‘fear’. It seemed important so I narrowed it down to 16.
Then to four.
And much later, prompted by artist Caroline Case, I narrowed the four to one.
Unmentionables - a series of collages made at the same time, in relation to subjects too feared to discuss.
