After April seminar, I started my studio time off with a week of hard core sanding and mucking around with ways of stripping away surface.

As always, it was the by-products of my deliberate actions that were the most interesting.

I really have to find a way to not get in my own way.

I discussed this with Noel and Elle.

Notes from our Zoom meeting:

• not allowed to find a conclusion

• once it's finished it's just starting

• in the process of finishing

• trick myself into new habits of mind

• ability to zoom in on detail but allow springy, spongy, thinking

• not success or failure but modulation

• keep it open right to the end of presentation

• just use space and don't worry about exhibition

• how to hold on to being able to move with more agency through the work

• sense of humour emerging in the work - hold on to that

• it takes some of the earnest over-sincerity out of the work

• being subject to multiple forces without being too allegorical

• all the conflicting forces coming to play in any given situation

• think about an install that gets in the road of the viewer

• working with the whole form of the room

• is there a language that could include a whole room environment

• the state of the work, colours, surfaces, how are they occupying space as part of an installation field

• does the space need to be modified to change the work to encourage agonism - interior architecture

So with all that in mind, I started with a practical task of finding a better way to attached a large work to the wall. I made some wooden braces and played with attaching some large existing pieces to the wall in my studio. It held. I wish I could test it out in my proposed space at Whitecliffe because the walls there aren't as robust as the one in my garage.

At the same time I was commissioned to make another piece in the same vein as this one from the end of last year.

I made the form and stopped before I "finished" it.

By parking it here I was letting it do all the things we'd been discussing in the Zoom.

So then I tried to make another one but doing deliberately what I had achieved accidentally.

Better. This has layers and layers of painting then sanding then painting. It needs a bit more sanding. Almost like the 'final' coat is sanding and not painting.

I had this yellow in my head and it took me a week of painting with it to remember what it reminded me of. My sister's first car. A primrose yellow Triumph Herald. I hadn't thought about that car for 40 years. Interesting how these images hold in little locked rooms in your brain till one of the doors opens one day. There's something about the shapes of this car I always loved as well. And it was about 20 years old when she bought it so it had weathered and mellowed.

Then back to making a large piece that 'gets in the road'.

While I was making it I kept thinking of a potential title, "Blonde Ambition Hits the Glass Ceiling". I wanted it to go up and fail by curving over. Yet to paint it. I'll go with the blonde theme and I might keep one panel just plain wood.

I'm also looking at the accidental stacks of forms that hold space in my studio.

I'm not sure where this is going yet but there's something there.