Cages
1996-2013
The first cage painting, Forget, was produced in response to the success of the Guinea Pig series, which necessarily functioned as a sideline, with the associations with so-called 'hobby painting', painted on Sundays at home. It wasn't that I resented the Guinea Pig's success (which was hardly a global phenomenon), it was just that I was always doing loads of other stuff, which was in danger of retreating into the background.
It was earlier, in the tent series, that the idea of eschewing compositional choice by containing the central figure within the confines of the rectangle came about. All the cages are enclosed in this way, touching the sides of the canvas at four points. So we have a kind of hermetic doubling. A cage within a cage.