In this decade I concentrated on printmaking and photographic polyptychs (both two- and three-dimensional), in a desire to shift the focus of much modern and contemporary art away from the irrationality of Dada and Surrealism (extreme use of metaphor) towards greater realism (use of metonymy). This polarity in culture was encapsulated by the novelist and scholar David Lodge by contrasting Dylan Thomas with Philip Larkin. Reading Lodge’s book Modes of Modern Writing in 1992 gave me confidence in my long-standing bias towards figurative art, in both senses: 1) depicting the human figure and 2) depicting objects in the world. If this interests you, the arguments are set out in more detail in the ‘Education’ part of the ‘About Me’ thread of this website, and in the ‘Ideas’ thread (see the section called, ‘David Lodge: Metaphor and Metonymy’).
The photographic polyptychs of this decade were exhibited as a group at the Lighthouse Media Centre in Wolverhampton in October 1998, at the same time as I began a two-year part-time M.A. in Fine Art at Cardiff School of Art and Design. On this course, I experimented with a wide range of genres, including video, installation and performance art.