FOR RELEASE: 15 MAY 2003  

Exhibition dates: 15 May 2003 - 27 July 2003

The artist as hunter gatherer is shown here, an Autolycus delving and scavenging in Peckham and Oxford. Artists thrive on what has been discarded and art's history starts with the colours of the earth at our feet.

The rusted iron comes from weekend walks to Port Meadow passing through the Lucy factory. Each transit yielded new treasures of random shapes, whether of rejected castings or of solidified metal puddles which had fallen from the jolted lorries moving scrap from one part of the works to the other. These I have combined, by pinning or welding, into the idols and fetishes of imaginary shrines. Lucy's move has now bought this adventure to an end.

The mud of Peckham is grey on the surface and yellow deeper down where London clay declares itself. Oxford's soil is more brownly warm. Journeys to Dorset and Umbria yielded reds and ochres, and a recent commission to paint a mural for the church in New Longton led to discovery of perhaps England's blackest mud, in Preston.

It was as an undergraduate in Oxford at St. Catherine's (in its then small home next door to Christchurch) that I sold my first work to Pembroke Junior Common Room. I first exhibited in an alphabetically arranged show at the Ashmolean, where I found myself dauntingly hung between Palma Vecchio and Picasso.

© Tom Phillips 2003

"Red Handed [With Lucy]", an exhibition of works by Tom Phillips and Richard Wentworth, is on display at the Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford, England, from Thursday 15 May 2003 through Sunday 27 July 2003. For directions and hours of operation, visit the CCPG website, or phone 01865 276172.

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