Is it possible to talk about your art as a form of activist expression? Your works convey a desire to make people reflect on reality and to consider different perspectives. Has this always been your motivation for creating art?

People are very bold with the word “activist”. I am not an activist, although I have engaged in activism in the past in different capacities, it is not something that I have dedicated myself to. I’m an artist, in the broadest sense, and am suspicious of anyone who would claim to be both. Art is inherently selfish, artists are too, we follow obsessive paths to any fault we might find without much regard for the world around us. An activist, a good activist, is selfless – acting in the interests of others. Give the credit to community organisers, hunt saboteurs, groups and individuals around the world who risk their lives in the hope of something better, artists don’t deserve that credit. When I started making art, it was really because I wasn’t good at anything else. I realised that art didn’t have to be realistic graphite drawings and just sort of muddled around for a few years. As artists, our job is to look very hard at things and then to turn them slightly, so as to make the findings of our investigation obvious – or even arresting. I like the idea of making art as sparring, a sort of testing ground in which there really are no consequences for failure. It’s an opportunity to try to think in as many different ways as possible.

How would you describe your way of making art within the contemporary art scene? Are there any artists whose way of creating art is in line with yours, anyone you admire?

I have the honour of being part of a group of artists whose work I enormously admire. Fern O’Carolan, Tom Harker, Sam Hutchinson, Maggie Dunlap, Allen-Golder Carpenter, Jack Kennedy, Edd Carr, Bora Akinciturk, KT Kobel and I’m sure many people I’ll feel terrible for forgetting make up at least part of our little international crew. Everyone on that list showed with or was involved in our project space, Screw Gallery, which up until the end of the Summer was located in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Having a close-knit group of co-conspirators is essential to making good work, without them, it would be impossible. When we had Screw, it was an amazing opportunity to work with some of the best emerging contemporary artists in the world around a time when we were beginning to have our first shows, representation, and international projects etc. It really was a fertile time for all of us, taking advantage of cheap rent in Leeds to expand our work and feed off of that shared ambition. I speak to most people on that list every single day, there is not one with whom I haven’t collaborated with in some capacity and each of them have had a profound effect on my own work – If you’re reading this now, I love you all very much.

Our society is bombarded with various influences, filtered realities, false appearances, anxieties, and comparisons. Do you believe this affects free creative expression? What aspects would you like to see more of in the field of contemporary art?

Well, of course it does. It would be impossible for it to not. What you eat for breakfast affects expression. I’m not so worried about the filtered reality thing in the sense that we should all be able to understand what is posted online as essentially fiction, the idea that we should feel bad because people are better at creating a more attractive fiction than we are feels trite. It especially feels trite when those anxieties come from real-world horror that is reduced to a token within that fictionalised (predominantly digital) environment. I’m not sure if you, dear reader, will remember the rumours of galleries and collectors blacklisting artists who choose to vocally support Palestine. If any such lists do exist, I guess put me on it and go fuck yourself. To that end, yes, it had a very big impact on Free Expression in the literal sense. Honestly, and I feel like I should probably write an essay about this, I don’t know what I’d like to see more of. A few years ago I was so sick of academic and moral posturing, art being saccharine attempts to get a pat on the back for expressing basic human decency or the most boring, dense slab of academic concrete one could imagine. I wanted a bit of glamour, fun, eccentricity, honesty, aggression – just any kind of genuine feeling. Well, the contemporary art world has re-embraced glamour, the fashion kids are out in force. They’re still so fucking boring. Peckers, the peckerdemic, bitch motherfucker in a blazer and shiny patent leather shoes hoping desperately that someone will notice exactly how well they’ve done in a pathetic contest to look the part. These are the kind of people that if you had the misfortune of trying to actually discuss any art with, their eyes glaze over and their fingers start to awkwardly scratch at wrists and tug at sleeves in the hope that they manage to get out of the conversation and back to mingeing bumps off of rich girls without revealing their utter ineptitude. It sucks, man. The pendulum swings mercilessly, its up to the viewer to see through the nonsense and pick out something real.