The Bleached Court (2002) – Frottage, Physical Glitch & Castles

So here’s a look back at an old piece from 2002 called The Bleached Court, part of that series of surreal landscapes I was making back then. This one, like the others, was built up through frottage and grottage, which I was proper into at the time. Rubbing textures from old wood, scraping paint back, smearing layers, and just seeing what crawled out of the mess. I were really trying to tap into that Dadaist Max Ernst energy, the randomness, the instinct, the way shapes just sort of appear out of the noise. Didn’t feel like painting in the usual sense. It was more like the piece finds you, hiding in the grain and glue. Sometimes you land on summat pleasing. Sometimes not so much. But that’s part of the pull. A big inspiration for these came from this odd little art book I picked up from The Works in Stockport, The Ten Dimensional Maze by Jan and Ted Arundell. Mid-’90s, I think. It was full of strange, twisted digital dreamscapes made on what looked like a half-broken Amiga vomited up some art. Everything in it spoke in riddles, like it were built from crash screens and foggy pixel gradients layered at impossible angles. A proper proto-AI dream, stuck looping in its own haunted logic. That book wedged itself in my head and never left. I think The Bleached Court might be one of those lost places it was trying to describe.