“Most of these drawings were started at the same time, during a rather manic two day period of work in 2003. The first marks were made impulsively on to approximately 200 A5 sheets of various kinds of Asian paper that I had been given. There were so many of them that they felt like runners bunched together at the beginning of a long race. In contrast to the way things started, I gradually realised that improvisation itself doesn’t only consist of working in ways designed to elude the inhibiting effects of critical thought. I found that improvisation could be a slow and extensive process, and could involve sustained passages of recognition, whereby possibilities narrowed down, and each drawing was able to become itself.

I can’t do the puzzling out, the thinking, before the work commences. I can only do it by working, by using the materials. Making, in itself, is not the difficult thing. It is seeing, in the sense of understanding – it is vision – that is the really crucial issue.

Whilst I am not able to determine the subjects of these drawings at the outset, that is definitely not the same thing as saying that anything at all can happen in them. Is it this tension, and a sense of fallibility, that makes this situation the only possible place to start from? Inevitably the field spreads out and, one by one, the drawings arrive at a conclusion, some with surprising speed, some with a frustrating slowness. Many are still in progress. Only by using time in the making process, by allowing time to yield up its subjective treasures, do these works arrive at their subjects. Drawing and subject approach and retreat from each other until, at a moment that can never be entirely anticipated, they become one. This is the “dance” referred to in the title of the series.”