The Editor has asked if I might say a few things about ‘space’ in relation to my work; and, on the face of it, that sounds like a reasonable question. After all, many artists often do talk passionately and with authority about space and their work. They sound like they know and they understand and they work with this stuff on a day-to-day basis like it is a material they have studied and manipulated over a number of years. ‘Ah, space… (an arm around your shoulder)… y’see, the thing about space, son, is…’ I hate that. But it makes me aware that I have never said or written anything about space in my work, that I have probably avoided the issue whenever it has arisen, and that I might have done so because I sense that I should have something to say about this thing called ‘space’. I may have avoided talking about space because it reminds me of a certain kind of artist from my youth, the kind of artist I spent most of my time trying not to be like. And I may have avoided the subject because space is ultimately so all encompassing that it leaves too much room for grand abstraction and talk of matters cosmic and sublime, things that I have found fairly useless when it comes to art.

This is the problem: space is everywhere, but it’s not always and everywhere the same. Space is a precondition for art, it is an aspect of art; it is literal and it is virtual, physical and optical, and that’s just for starters. Obviously enough, painters have traditionally created the illusion of space on a flat surface, whereas sculptors have marked out, occupied or contained actual space in their work. This may be another reason why I have always found it such a confusing subject: because much of the work I make originates from a point somewhere between painting and sculpture. Or rather, it derives mostly from the monochrome and the readymade: types of work that have an uncomfortable relationship with painting and sculpture and a cultivated indifference to the formal etiquette of painterly and sculptural space.

I think about planes more than space. The monochrome is either a flat uninterrupted plane, a paint-job, like a door — or perhaps it is infinite depth, a void, a bounded boundlessness. I guess I don’t mind the possibility of the latter, as long as I don’t lose sight of the former. I want to hang on to the possibility that Nothingness might just be nothing. This is what’s at stake for me in the Found Monochromes of London. Each image in this series of 81 photographs shows a small void in an otherwise saturated visual field; a bit of peripheral vision in the urban environment organised in a simple formal sequence, where each white rectangle is more nothing-much than nothing-ness. Admittedly, these banal, flat planes can occasionally flip into semi mysterious spaces — so space is there as a possibility, if only just. And that’s fine.

In other work, such as the series of found-lightbox-and-shelving-unit based three-dimensional structures, my relationship with space feels similarly awkward and unresolved. I have described these works as having more in common with billboards than sculptures. They are flat, or flat-ish, and frontal; they are divided between a glowing, colourful face and a grubby steel support, and from the side they pretty much disappear. So, again, they feel more like planes slotted into an environment than something in-the-round that has mass and volume which fills and creates space. This is most obvious in two works from this group, Barrier, made in 2002 for a gallery in London, and The Magic Hour, made this year for a show in Mexico City. Each was made to fill a specific aperture that linked two rooms in a building, and the work effectively blocked the passage between the two. Each work offers two starkly opposed experiences to the viewer, depending on where they stand. Each has an effect on the spaces either side but doesn’t actually occupy any gallery space at all.

One of the most unpredictable and pleasurable elements of these lightbox based works — for me at least — is the light that spills from them onto other surfaces in the environment, especially polished or reflective surfaces. I take photographs of these reflections on floors, windows, door-handles, ashtrays or whatever. It’s so temporary, so contingent, so transient — entirely optical and the opposite of sculpture. Again, it’s more about planes than space; although these reflections also give a certain luminous depth to those planes, if only for a moment and from a particular angle.