What would I burn

Each image is made from found paper. There are various sizes - nothing bigger than a sheet of paper you might find in a jotter or ledger. I’ve been collecting bits of paper from urban pavements since the 1990’s and finally started doing something with them in 2025. The title comes from a conversation I’d had with another artist where he said he’d rather burn an artwork than let someone undervalue it.
While the content of the found writing is often interesting, I’m not responding directly to the substance of what is said in whatever I do/make/paint. The written (and drawn) content is simply a starting point for something that is more akin to graffiti - ‘I’m here!'. The content itself acts as witness to and evidence of an earlier pre-digital time and it’s the dialogue between these two points in time that I’m interested in. When I originally collected these things from the pavement there was a voyeuristic quality - a kind of unbidden peak into other people’s lives. Over the years this has changed, replaced now by a sense of archaeology - they have become evidence of human behaviour that existed hardly any time ago at all, yet time it now feels so very hard to recollect.
There are some transcripts of some these found texts here.