If I had to choose, I would probably still have to say that drawing, that act of scratching out something with marks and colour on some surface or other, is my first language. And for many reasons, no doubt revealed in the many and various motivations of all my decades of performance work, I’ve always understood my drawings and paintings primarily as acts and objects, rather than simply pictures.

Which I guess is why I have rarely shared much of my physical drawings online – as the documentation can only ever really assert the image, and the image is usually such a small part of what I’m working through with them as objects. There is clearly a more immediate sense to the digital photo and graphic work here, for obvious reasons – at least rendered in the same form (if not at the same scale or resolution) as I made it, without too much translation.

But as I find myself beginning what already feels like a potentially long-term series of new drawings, and the first phase of new studio work in quite some time, I also have the feeling that I would like to find some immediate way to record and share aspects of this new series of paper works… or at least fragments of them, as and however they develop.

One thing I do already know, and building on the still (intentionally) unresolved beginnings of a series of small canvases I first scratched out almost twenty years ago, is that I’m calling and thinking about these new drawn works as a series of small dilemmas… 

Images: Mike Brookes, details of the drawing ‘small dilemma #1’, pencil and watercolour on paper, 60cm x 60cm, 2024