One concentrates on what one's doing as one does it, to 'fuse' with the activity, at the same time keeping the mind open to the potentiality of what might develop. One can, by remaining 'receptive', make ongoing alterations, as appropriate.

It may appear as trance, but isn't. One's very aware of the physicality one's in. I'm not transported to a 'beyond'. We're in the here and now. 'Entertainment' as art attempts to take spectators out of their situation and transport them 'elsewhere'. It's a form of escape. I want people more alert to the actuality we're in.

One's conscious of when no-one's there, or only one person, besides oneself. The activity has it's own momentum. Does breathing stop if not seen?

From time to time I dozed.

There are several reasons for using the case. This work, 'Out the In', is an extension of the one made at Riverside Studios, London, called 'In the Out'. There were certain elements I intended to use here, but through a misunderstanding, two crucial items were not available. This threw me back. I chose an empty case to display 'presence' of absence in protective glass. It became focal.

Yes, but in reference to life. It's like a fish tank. What might fish represent to an ecologist?

I'm interested in decay, where it constitutes the discrepancy between ideology and actuality. The fish is a Christian symbol. It's also a symbol for the subconscious mind and subterranean levels of awareness not usually manifest in 'waking' reality. Then there's pollution and 'dead' matter. Fish smell and rot, as do religious/political ideologies (locally and globally).

I'm living there. I don't subscribe to making art in a vacuum, or to art's being an hermetic activity whose life depends on being contained within gallery walls. Aesthetics alone are effete. As well as grace there's the

'...brutality of fact...'

It's essential.

To have both feet on the ground, exactly where we are, is useful. Fusion between spiritual and political/social/cultural facts of our lives is important, not as hand-me-down 'beliefs', but as directly discerned, first hand.

Some of it was grappled with (as a student) in Dundee. There I learned various art skills, but faced the resulting dilemma of questioning the worth of it. - On leaving college, students faced a massive wall of indifference to their work. They had to 'make sense' of this and act on it. Many gave up, relinquished their creativity, and joined the swollen ranks of the Deeply Asleep. I saw the artist as a spiritual 'salesman', cut off from an anchored function in society. - Through committed perseverance one evolves a discernment of art's real worth. Pat answers don't cut it.

No. That's only one feature.

Wholeness embraces everything - positive and negative.

The artist isn't outwith society. One may feel alienated from many of its values. The public is a collective of individuals. You're a member, as am I.

Individuals are empowered to 'unstop' their own creativity. Unfortunately, from an early age, we've been mentally conditioned to Not Know. Damage done through education (so called) disconcerts. Through blind and 'knowing' ignorance, many parents and teachers rape and castrate the imagination of children, before they're seven. A few escape. Most don't. It may be disturbing and disorientating to temporarily suspend judgement and 'lift the lid' of accrued values, to see what's deeper, to uncover what's below the private/public veneer. Art can heal.

It happens through streamlining, unitising and subliminal repetition.

Yes. Information is so controlled and manipulated through the distorting agents of television and press (gutter or other). Forced reliance on business funding and private sponsorship places substantial pressure on art groups to generate products which reflect the values of sponsors. It's hard to imagine effective art, openly critical of government policies, being sponsored through business. That puts increased pressure on 'difficult' work during this reactionary, most conservative decade.

I'll resist it and I'm certain others will. In the 1980s there's precious little evidence, nationally or internationally, of ground breaking, innovative art of social conscience being seen. Is it being made? Many venues showing 'difficult' work are closing, unable to keep going financially. We need them to counter the prevailing fodder of Mixed-Hash, Mish-Mashed aesthetic redundancies, strutting cockily (headlessly) as 'chickened out' market art of the '80s.

There's conflict. It's up to artists not to get downtrodden, but to retain 'edge'. We're innovators and instigators, individually and collectively and shouldn't allow 'outside' manipulators to dictate our development. Art groups unable to get exhibitions in accredited institutions can house their own, and/or find alternative venues and methods of exhibiting inside or out of gallery circuits. Art groups in the '80s could intervene far more practically and effectively than hitherto in political, social and cultural arenas.

Government's attitude to the arts will worsen. If a gallery won't give me a show, I can put one on myself in my studio, where I live, or in the street. I'll invite friends. They can invite me to theirs. Before long, essential art may bypass official institutions and operate another circuit, run by artists. There are precedents. In numerical terms, an operation, though miniscule, can yet be effective. One simple network may map new worlds.

We learn to walk by falling, crawling and picking ourselves up (in life and art).

It takes weeks, months and years for images to 'settle', for resonance to fully evolve in mind ... or less than a second ... to 'see' beneath societal Facelift.