"These were some of the earliest works on paper that later became a five-year folder on my desktop called Exploitation Painting Workshop. I stole the title from John Nixon's Experimental Painting Workshop, by the Australian geometric abstract painter. His death suggested something different. In my head, it marked the end of experimentation. It was time for experimentation to settle into a recognisable form in my practice.

I started feeling that everything demanded movement. Even objects had to be active, moving, and performing. There was always pressure to be perpetual rather than perceptual, and to remain relevant. Against this, I became interested in the opposite condition: stillness.

The word exploitation came from exploitation movies. I like those films because they don't pretend to be perfect. They rely on bad taste, cheap special effects, and over-the-top tricks. I wanted painting to have that same spirit. It could be fake. It could even be a kind of fraud.

Painting, for me, is also a kind of therapy. Spending hours looking, copying, repainting, scraping, and smudging images became a form of cognitive reframing. Painting doesn't solve my problems, but it changes how I look at them.

The word workshop is also a joke. A workshop sounds like many people working together, sharing ideas, and making things. But this workshop is only me. There is no team. I do everything myself and take all the risks myself. The workshop is imaginary, but the labour is real. "