the one where post conceptualism won't leave me alone

One, personal, central struggle in my practice is the tension between Post-Conceptualism (specifically the academic strain I encountered in the 1990s and the effect university had on questioning my practice) and my inherent impulse towards material and aesthetic pleasure.

The 1990s Conceptual 'Trap'

The lectures we had at university in the 1990s asked me to question external reading and context of my work to the extent I lost my centre.

The Power dynamic: Post-Conceptualism, as it was presented, intellectually removed the power and authority of craft and material, which impacted my work heavily, I lost my centre. I questioned my every move intellectually.

The Feeling: This left me with a sense of pointlessness that trapped my making at university in the 1990s and prevented me from hearing anything from me. I got lost in the perspectives and understanding around me.

Current Focus: The Balance

The point now is about achieving a balance between art as thought (the conceptual legacy) and modernist concerns (the formal, material aspects).

Aesthetic Dilemma: I do not know if I want to make aesthetically pleasing work or whether this is just the residual fear of my 1990s training. My truth is I want both, work that evokes feeling and offers an indeterminacy of experience where there is space for the viewer. I also have an urge to disrupt and subvert.

At the end of the day, I have pleasure in communicating through colours and surface. This is the non-negotiable, material core of my practice, but not enough on its own.

The Current Task

I am seeking to balance the post-conceptual dance—how do I integrate the necessary intellectual framework without sacrificing the communicative power and personal pleasure I find in the material aspects (colour and surface)?

My goal is now to achieve a genuine synthesis where material pleasure is the engine of conceptual depth. The clarity I found in Graham Crowley’s text on Stephen O’Driscoll—specifically his mention of that rare "combined love of the material and his grasp of the poetic"—tells me that the pleasure I take in colour and surface isn't a trap, but the essential tool. This means my work must deliberately transcend mere description. The final outcome must be the materialised expression of a psychological state. I am no longer aiming to make an object that looks like a thought, but one that, to paraphrase Crowley, demands to be experienced as poetry; the object itself becomes the cohesive statement that translates fragmented action into an articulate 'state of mind'. This article gives me hope.