'My background is in (mostly) human movement: following training at Manchester Polytechnic I worked first as an actor, then as a teacher, director and author, helping others materialise the body (and ‘character’) in space.

I’m a collector. A few years ago I began to ponder how my collection of strange, damp driftwood shapes - each one gathered from a Yorkshire Coast beach over a thirty-year period - might be transformed into indoor sculpture. 

Washed-up wood presents mysteries. What type of tree was this? How old might it be? (Some pieces appear to be thousands of years old.) A rusty nail or neat drilled hole hints at some lost human purpose. Colonising fungi create strange surface patterns (‘spalting’), only fully revealed after thorough drying and ‘working’. 

With each new find, my ambition is to reveal. Grain, spalting, natural voids, curvature - each piece is worked alone with no attempt to attach one to another, and with no dogged pursuit of a predetermined form (animal shape, etc)

A selection of sculptures from my long collaboration with the North Sea formed the core of ‘Drift / Lit’, a 2023 exhibition staged (as part of the ‘Scarborough Lights’ festival) at Scarborough station. Soon afterwards I took over a glass-fronted former taxi office at the venue and now display a changing range of sculpture, free to view in this unstaffed pop-up space. (I’m currently exhibiting new lit work there for the 2024 ‘Scarborough Lights’.) At some point during 2026 a new mix of pieces will be discoverable, squirrelled away inside a National Trust property not far from here.

This, though, is a first-ever sale of a little corner of my collection - offered now in partnership with blue tree, my favourite small gallery.'