For as long as I can remember, the flow of my work has been punctuated by periods of disengagement. Moments when, for one reason or another, I find myself stepping out and distancing myself – at least far enough to be able to take a look at where I am and what I am doing. This is one of those moments.

In busy times, as recent years have been, I might just need to stop and shake off the accumulating dirt and debris that inevitably attaches and gathers around the work as it rolls along. At other times, proposals simply serve their purpose, or reveal why they won’t, and I can do something else. Sometimes perhaps, I have just had enough – or enough of too little – for a while…

Whatever the provocation in this instance, I find myself in a familiar period of sceptical disinterest. And as I often do at such times, I have also found myself scratching around and pulling out specific fragments from the archive. Revisiting things that seem, in my memory at least – and if only in relation to the things that I am now looking for, or looking to avoid – to persist as moments of clarity.

Here is a fragment that I have been repeatedly returning to, enough to remaster a new video from the original dusty camcorder tape, from an informal fixed camera recording of my first ‘something burning’ – an action I subtitled ‘but it will turn out wrong’ – back in 2000: