A shed at the end of a garden. A place where paintings are made over months and years, where things accumulate, get moved, get covered over, and begin again. These photographs were taken there across time, with a phone, without ceremony, as a way of looking back at a practice while it was still unfolding. They move between the very close and the more distant: details the working eye passes over, and wider views that show how a space holds a life of making. They are fragments rather than a full account, but they carry something of the rhythm and residue of the work.
The Shed Project
Fragile Agency
My shed functions as a living archive. It holds the afterimages of repeated gestures: the residue of painting, cleaning, waiting, returning, and beginning again. Every stain, patch, and accumulation of dust has been sedimented over years by gestures that rarely announce themselves as meaningful. The shed records time through material build-up, a slow and largely invisible inscription of practice into surface and space.
Photography enters this slow field differently. Where painting accumulates through duration, photography compresses time into an instant. A photograph captures a fragment of the studio and holds it still, available for reflection and return. Together the two mediums reveal the labour of making according to their different temporal logics: painting as accrual, photography as compression.
The artist's studio carries powerful myths. Bacon's studio suggests obsession, excess, and psychological intensity; Warhol's Factory stages production as spectacle and brand. The shed belongs to neither. It is intimate, provisional, and attentive: a place where practice unfolds through repetition, care, and small acts of maintenance, and where work can keep its own tempo outside the demands of acceleration and visibility.
Photographing it becomes a kind of displaced self-portrait. I am not shown directly, but I am present throughout: in worn brushes, marked floors, pigment deposits, and accumulated dust. Unlike the fleeting self-image of social media, these photographs linger on persistence. The studio stands in for labour, time, and attention, making practice itself the subject.
The palette is one example. Each working session deposits a new layer of pigment, and each new session begins to cover it. What accumulates is an unintentional painting in itself: a record of decisions, colours, and sequences that will never be seen again once the next layer arrives. The photograph interrupts that erasure. It holds a moment of the palette's life, not to preserve it permanently, but to acknowledge that it existed. Across the shed the images do the same, catching the floor before it changes further, a painting before it is moved or covered, an arrangement of objects before the next day's work dismantles it.
The camera is usually my phone, always at hand, so the photographs have accumulated alongside the shed itself, across seasons, different states of work, moments of pause or intensity. No single image contains the place. Over time, though, the archive is becoming the way the studio is known, to others and to me: a version of the shed that persists alongside the physical place and may ultimately outlast it. The shed is more than where the paintings are made. It is a record of how a practice survives.