 I was starting to collect images probably from the early 70s, late 60s onwards and I did do collages at that point but I count this as a turning point, a new beginning because it was just nothing but the original and so it's difficult to date it because I in fact I didn't find it myself, my ex-wife Rosetta Brooks who found the image and she gave it she thought that I would be interested and she must have handed it to me that way up because I instantly saw the potential for inversion and what this meant and it it took me but I think it was 1972 that she did this and I dated it from 1977 five years later and all that time it actually went on her piano she was a pianist and it stayed where the music was on the music stand of the piano for five years and I was just musing about it can I do something as simple as that just can that be art just turning a picture upside down and so it took a long time to finally think yes I can nothing else just that and the inversion I think was really prophetic about my activity in general because in a sense I saw her as the muse in a classical sense and him like a sleeping former and somehow by this inversion I mean you see it the right way up and it's obviously what is about is the man playing a tune he's lost in the tune his eyes are closed but this way up the news becomes the thing in control and by the news it means the inspiration you and for me that's what I was doing in my work from then onwards I was prioritizing what was already there rather than my contribution so it became about the consumer she's the consumer so the consumer becomes more important through the inversion than the producer all these thoughts were in my mind about this and it became more and more important as a piece and it then started me collecting film stills so that I had a small group infant and in fact there were some over there that were from the same source as this one but gradually I started collecting more and more film stills and I began to think well we live in a culture of images and it seems unrealistic as an artist to think you can produce something completely new without that that field of images I wanted to develop a practice for myself which was in some ways true to the the existence in a culture of images I suppose I mean film stills used to be quite plentiful he used to be in the 1970s in the mid 1970s you'd find them everywhere in junk shops because their function as foyer stills they used to call them foyer stills in cinemas in the foyer you'd get a line of images which represented the main attraction of the week or even outside the cinema sometimes in special windows but but in the 19 in the mid 1970s as a result of tv and a number of things people stopped going to the cinema in that same way and so the big cinemas got split up into multiplexes many screen cinemas and all these images started to come into the junk shops secondhand book shops you'd find them everywhere so I just started collecting they're very cheap pretty easy to get get hold of they were a very easy source of material gradually over time of course it became more difficult because they became more they weren't being produced anymore they belong to a particular period really about five years ago there was only one shop left in London there are many in Los Angeles I've discovered all over the world you can find them but in London there was only one left and I do like the British film stills particularly and I had just made a bit of money out of my work and so they were in crisis as well and they were going to close down and so I bought the entire stock of the shop so I now have this huge library of film stills but that's quite recent but now I don't use those the paradox is now I feel it's such an important resource I'm still buying from elsewhere and I keep this intact so I don't know it's a paradox I mean I'll often buy blind I go to image collections commercial image collections and I say do you have any images that are damaged or in any way use useless and they send the boxes full of views and that's magical I love buying blind and sometimes I don't know what it is I see an image and it just rivets me I can't explain I'm fascinated by but I'm not quite sure what it is and it takes me a while to discover and I and often I need to remove the ostensive function of the image in order to become to really receive fully that fascination so it often means blocking out identity or the central figure within it most of my theories have been going for about 30 years the mask started 30 years ago and I still do masks so I quite honestly do want to complete things completion is a very important thing for me but it there's always something new happens you know I think I've completed it and then something else happens and I find something it's usually a new find a new set of images that inspires me to and I realize oh I'm carrying on with that old series again the film still collages started in the late 70s as I told you but the ones using portraits started a little bit later at the beginning of the 80s because in the junk shops where all these photographs arrived portraits were still regarded as valuable whereas the film stills were not really so valuable because they were bromide black and white photographs of famous people so they had a value until people realized how many were produced and then they came down and so by the beginning of the 80s I could afford to use them and this was the first which I called the mask and then it was also kind of the first real acknowledgement of surrealism because it was kind of surrealism in the in the 70s was probably the most debased movement imaginable it was you you know surrealism had become the thing that was used for cigarette advertising or whatever it was the kind of images Salvador Dali on you know on your bedroom wall in the post that kind of thing it was kind of really low level there was very difficult there was a taboo about it but I became I had become very fascinated by surrealism because it represented an alternative relationship with the found image from either new image art or pop art or any of those things in a way the postcard over the face it's a mask it's an obliteration of the identity for no longer do you recognize Gregory Peck for example I can tell you this only I know but it's no longer important who these people are all that is important is that it's the framework of a portrait really and these each of these different postcards were kind of metaphors for interiority for the idea of an interior state of mind I guess and you know caves and so on are the spaces that are inside in a way the viennese philosopher um as Ayas Kaneti says that the mask um reveals much but it conceals much more and I like this idea of concealment of um a concealment that also reveals somehow so you can see through but yeah well the face isn't open when you look at somebody in the face you're looking behind behind the objective features because you believe there is something behind I'm Warhol famously said there's nothing behind my face I'm just a mask you see which is interesting um so yeah it's about it's very much about the idea um the relationship between the face the mask um the mask is a kind of fixity in a way superimposed upon facial flux so there's a kind of sense of stillness that's arrived at I find with me but it can be that process of stilling can also be quite horrific so there's a horror too