Children are surprisingly small. Relative to adults. For this reason, I have left them out of previous projects as they would not mix well with grown-ups in terms of composition. Looking at small scale wooden sculptures from Indonesia which are about the scale of children I realised I was missing something interesting.

This was enough for me to start a project. I compare such projects to surfing. I paddle around waiting for a likely wave, or idea or observation and then climb up and ride the wave as best I can. Whilst on the wave certain things become obvious and possible and I grab them as I go past - films, sculptures, paintings, murals and T-shirts. If I don’t grab the ideas right then, they won’t be accessible again. The language develops and makes its own decisions in terms of colours, levels of detail, compositions. Then the wave crashes and it’s over.

I have an assistant whose partner is head of English at a school just outside London. The school agreed to let me film groups of children from various years. I wanted the youngest children from reception and then worked my way up to Year 4. That meant five groups and I felt that four children would allow the compositions that were forming in my mind. So, 20 children all getting quite excited and not really listening to instructions and many having forgotten to bring the clothes I had suggested. In the end I found the best method was to walk with them one by one across the school stage while my assistant filmed from the other end of the school hall. We chatted as we went and then they ran around, letting off steam, to join the queue at the start. They were amazingly engaged and present. Some were shy and others extremely chatty and playful. I have sent them the results as the project unfolds.

We took mountains of material back to the studio and began the process of animation. With my two co-animators I choose the smoothest loops of a double step that allows me to make a continuous walking figure. I draw every other frame tracing over the stream of photos, changing each one slightly as the step proceeds. As I draw, the rules for each character become apparent, which details to include, how to draw and generalise flowing hair or flicking hems. The last frame and the first never match up perfectly as we are not robots, and the angle of view from the camera to the model changes slightly through the stride, but with hours of work we manage to stitch the two ends together and make a relatively smooth continuously walking portrait. My assistants draw the in between frames and play back is 50 frames a second.

After some trial and error and a bit of logic I found that the best way to combine the four children from each year was to have them walking in a kind of queue, making a fairly constant image within the frame of the screen. Each child walks at a slightly different speed so the relationships between them change over time, like four independent pendulums swinging. Their colouring and clothes provide a mixed and natural palette, and their different sizes also allow for a balanced, dynamic composition. I see it as a painting rather than a film in the sense that it has no storyline or a start and finish, it’s a moving picture composed partly by me but partly randomly by the natural movement of the children and the computer that runs them as independent elements. They could be playing a game in the playground or crossing the road to the park. The somewhat goofy attitudes contrast with the authoritative large LED signage.

As a by-product of animating, I get some thirty drawings of each child that then become a palette to draw from to compose static group images. The drawings are in a sequence so I can make a composition with four children where the frozen moment of the stride balances with the other characters. It’s a mix and match process of throwing in and out the possible positions of each child and then switching their direction and position on the canvas. I aim for balance and dynamism, thinking of figures on an ancient temple wall frieze or athletes on a Greek vase.

I look at ancient ways of creating images as well as using methods I see around me today in the city, in shopping malls and airports. Public places old and new are rich sources for methods of imaging and communication, from incised lines on vertical rock faces to carved and painted stone palace walls, mosaic floors and frescoes. And then there are recent backlit adverts and acrylic shop signs, LED and LCD screens and towering road signs. Humans seem to naturally manipulate the materials around them to create images of the world, of themselves, externalising inner images of the experienced world and sharing the process, communicating like a spoken language. 

Each retina reads a flat image but your body senses space, and that, combined with bifocal vision and movement, means that a picture with a carved depth creates a kind of animation, a sort of magic trick as the brain reads, competing image and material in the same space, fighting and combining to create a somewhat imaginary zone. The Egyptians used this to great effect in the sharp desert light, carving the temple walls and then painting them flat again. I have copied this technique and exaggerated it using CNC cutting to create deeply 3D panels that are combined like stone building blocks to create something like a wall of constructed image. Each section of colour, each sock or ponytail becomes a high island in a black sea of lines. From the front it reads as surface, but this breaks down as you move to the side and see the drawing as more of a complex landscape. It reminds me of the experience of landing in a plane where the town below goes from being a flat map to the lived in labyrinth of buildings of your hometown.

A shadow is a kind of natural drawing. Outline the edge of the shadow in pencil and you have an artwork. A popular parlour game in the 19th Century making silhouettes. I sent a photographer to the seafront promenade in Busan, South Korea and - with camera at waist height - he photographed the passing parade of walking people. While trying to maintain their natural form, their “shadow” I traced the people that had the clearest outline. I used a very thick line to draw forcing me to stick to only the major elements of each person, resulting in a kind of hieroglyph or logo for each person. Details such as feet or fingers got eaten up in the low resolution of my drawing, as if I was far away and only glimpsing the passing crowd, which I was.

I gave each figure two colours similarly reducing the detail, but as the colours were chosen from them - hair, skin, bags and clothes, I hoped to maintain their overall sense of presence. The result is a kind of language of forms, of images, of people. I can combine them like words in a sentence to create a complex street scene or present them as individuals. By extruding the drawing, I can make the shadow stand up on its own. By adding a low concrete plinth, such as you might find on a garage forecourt holding the petrol company logo, I turn the person into a statue and the statues become a crowd. 

In the morning I get up early to beat the traffic. I make tea and feed the cats, working on automatic. I don’t particularly see things so much as read the surroundings, matching knowledge of where the cat food is and body memory of the kitchen space. As I cycle to the studio, I read the traffic and approaching trucks making fine mathematical calculations at high speed to avoid danger. We read the world making interior models adjusted by the second. Making art is a way of playing with this process of reading and modelling. I experiment and test, bridging the internal and external, bringing the way I see and read the world out into shared space using materials and imaging methods taken from the world around me, past and present. Scale is a key element in creating this dialogue between you and the surroundings. The process of navigating the object physically as you read it visually becomes more pronounced as scale increases. Walking around the object is as good a way of comprehending it as looking at it from one spot.

Each exhibition I make is an installation and not just a bunch of works on show. I plan the exhibition in VR walking around the virtual space on a regular basis trying out different groups of work and different placements. This allows me to create a balanced composition within the space. I can tell a story with the show and create a kind of visual playground using one work to contrast with or complement another, but the works remain independent and could make other combinations or stand alone.