The institutional tiles beneath my feet screamed public swimming pool, and if that wasn’t enough, the huge red hole—like the orifice of some great beast—presented itself to me. The echo of children’s screams spilled from inside the glowing plastic trumpet. The hallowed space of the 1990s water park was calling.

I was wasting time—daydreaming as usual—while trying to gather my New Year notes. List writing, editing, and rewriting is one of my main pastimes. I spend more time doing this than any other part of my practice. Why? Sections lead to lists, lists lead to projects, projects lead to new sections. They form an interlocking map of ideas, constantly wavering between procrastination and efficiency. At what point do notes and lists stop being signposts to work and become work in themselves?

There’s no feeling like being in a public swimming pool in the early 1990s. The clammy cold warmth, strangers’ bodies, the endless parade of counters just slightly too high to see over. Flip-flops and discarded towels, stray plasters and rubber key bracelets.

My local Midlands pool, minutes away from Birmingham’s notoriously tangled Spaghetti Junction, was also blessed with a terrifying high diving board and waterslides of various speeds, sizes, and angles. Even as a memory, I can taste the tepid, chlorinated water.

As I wait in line on the stairs for one of the slides, I dream not of the Space Invader crisps and soft drinks that awaited me at the end of the ride—the gold I’d been imagining on the drive there—but of potential dangers. Jagged edges of plastic, where fibreglass sheets are joined, stare at me like paper cuts, waiting for the opportunity to slice my innocent, exposed skin. Each step up gives me a new perspective, a new chance to turn back. And once I’ve entered this dark, liminal space, what could possibly be around the corner? Who knows—the tunnel disappears after only a few feet, a tunnel I know must leave the building to return, hopefully, into the plunge pool. How could something like this possibly exist? How could someone make this? What engineer, what architect, my raw child mind asks itself, could have created such an octopus monster, a suburban Kraken?

I tell myself I make lists to create green spaces. These spaces are times when I can work on a project; everything else in life is dedicated to creating them. They are periods when all the art is made—this, now, this moment I write, is a green space. They are not just times when I make a sculpture or write something; they are spaces sculpted and formed by everything that went into making them: the amount of money I could make, the materials I could find, the space I work in, and of course the ideas that go into them. These lists are the tubes that lead to the green space. They provide the psychological framework within which the work is made. Each and every time, I try to list the way I got there, to preserve the journey, to hopefully replicate it next time. It’s like trying to create a map from the present moment to the work, to a future me, which of course then becomes the present moment.

To get to the top of the Hydrofume—the name given to the slide that incorporated both a trip outside and a vertical drop—I had to walk up painted concrete steps, covered in a slim rubber mat to prevent accidents. Strangers revealed their personalities as they passed: some with confidence, others with trepidation, all different heights and weights, all in tight, colourful Speedos. At around eleven years old, the only time I saw a stranger’s semi-naked body was on television—a time before the internet, even before Page 3, when kissing was more familiar when done to an extra-terrestrial than to other humans. In the early 1990s, tattoos were rare and always darkly exotic. All I knew of them was that they reminded me of lists and science diagrams, combined with a dark foreboding probably brought about by Robert De Niro’s painted torso in Cape Fear. They seemed like strange labels, lists pointing towards hearts and bones, sailing ships and ropes.

Tattoos are made under the guise of signifiers: they are meant to mean something, to point to something else, whether that meaning is deliberate or not. Most often the message travels from the outside inward—from naval tattoos like Hold Steady across the knuckles to personal relationships, birth dates, or simply mum. They seem to point towards the heart. Somehow their meaning is created through a kind of biological osmosis, as if ink pumped through the dermis, combined with blood, could take the outside world of words, images, and diagrams and push them closer to the heart—the resting place of the soul.

These are thoughts I have now as I think of myself, arms crossed, hurtling through a small plastic tube. I remember even then being aware of the thickness of the plastic—so thin that light shone through it. This membrane was my second skin, protecting me from the outside world. Freefall, turning, completing a circle, then re-entering the building. In the warm, intestine-like interior, I anticipated—or imagined—the cold outside world. I screwed my eyes shut, praying for the experience to be over, for the destination to be reached. The internal scream—mum, are we nearly there yet?—reached new watery lows.

I look back at the computer in front of me. The twists and turns of lists give way to more lists—where do they point? Like the plot of a bad sequel to Memento, it quickly becomes unclear what state of mind I was in when I made one list or another. What was my intention? Wasn’t there a decision two weeks ago to relabel everything, to date it all and put it into more specific folders? When I made that alteration—did I cross it off the list?

Or is this a list for a new work? Or a cautionary note about a person, a lover, an artwork, or a life? Or simply a to-do far removed from art altogether? Like De Niro’s movie tattoos, they are fake—notes designed to distract, empty characters written for a backstory that was never pursued, a work never resolved.

The blood rushes to my head as water swooshes and sloshes in my ears. The final vertical drop approaches. All thoughts and ideas, plans and rules, past and future are shaken inside the plastic tube—a godlike test tube, a cocktail shaker with memories for ice cubes. Words rush forth, pathways coalesce, then suddenly, when the mind can take no more, I reach the bottom of the ride, the end of the list. I have entered the Green Space. The destination. All is peaceful. The actual work can happen. I have skin in the game.

For a few moments I am suspended in bliss. I am in my green space—underwater. But within a few seconds in the plunge pool, or a few hours in the studio, it is over. I can’t breathe. I must, at all costs, find air. I bolt upward, swimming for my life: towards civilisation, towards a job that needs to be done, messages that have to be replied to. The real world rushes in. Before I know it, I’ve crawled out, back to reality. Cold, humid, recycled air fills my lungs. Gravity takes hold. My body shifts from suspension to feeling… reality hits. And that’s it. It’s the end.

There’s nothing else to do but climb the steps. Choose another tube. Make another list. Go again.

Image : Sandcastle Waterpark, families in the wave pool, Blackpool Gazette, 1987

I saw a butterfly on the Tube the other day. To be precise, it was about 10:30 a.m. on a grey Tuesday morning. I stepped onto the Northern Line heading south and looked to my right, towards the loud, expectant low grumble. A young woman walked past, dressed in ‘new beige.’ Her white shoes squeaked assertively.

As she veered to her left, she left in her wake a butterfly. The butterfly was moving, drifting to and fro, fluttering in the air currents that surely had their own language—their own special subterranean paths. As I watched, the butterfly flew perilously close to the tracks; the depth of the trench versus the tiny size of the butterfly gave a strange sense of vertigo.

Is there anyone in this world who does not think about life in this way? Confusing, abandoned, and out of place. From this confusion, this messy collision of feelings and facts, artists find the kernel of every idea. They navigate life’s shifting winds—these pulls and pushes—dragged down by a sense of worried existence, weaving all of it into their work with technical skill—or brute force. From that mess, they create a kind of ladder—a ladder that, in the corner of their eye, they imagine could take them to the moon.

Yet artists somehow know, deep down, that what they are searching for is not simply creation for others but reflection—an understanding of themselves, and that in some way all the navigating, questioning, crafting, and skill is itself some kind of necessary message—a kind of labour that is a reflection of our struggle.

This butterfly, which for all intents and purposes resembles a bait dangling on a fishing line, becomes an easy metaphor for all of us. It’s a gentle, tragic reminder of our fragile lives. Born from a twinkle in nature’s eye, it mirrors our own creative path: a ladder rising from chaos, a struggle between the pull of imagination and the certain weight of death.

At the journey’s end, we dance off into the void, into darkness, yet it is not until we reach that darkness—as the butterfly did, flying down into the tunnel—that its dance (its artwork) becomes truly significant. It was only when its shape and form disappeared into the darkness, when it rejoined the place it came from, that I could reflect on and appreciate the disjointed poetry of this dance—the end object, the memory.

“And I, infinitesimal being, drunk with the great starry void, likeness, image of mystery—I felt myself a pure part of the abyss.”
— Pablo Neruda

Image : Richard Nik Evans, Red (detail), 2006

It always feels like art fairs, such as Frieze, take more than they give. They are maximalist experiences, overloaded with spectacle and noise, whereas studio visits are minimalist, intimate, and often fragile. The irony is that when an art fair comes to town — a little like a circus or sideshow — artists often follow, or are dragged along, and that can lead to studio visits. Yet the intense, feverish energy of the fair, charged with false promises of fame, money, and truth, tends to leak into the studio. The fair frames and fuels the visit, and everything becomes infected with its urgency and superficial glare.

On a recent visit, my guest arrived visibly pumped. After half an hour of art-world gossip, we finally had to confront the elephant in the room — the work itself. It’s always a difficult bridge to build when the visitor makes or exhibits work very different from what they’re looking at. Ideally, both sides start bridge-building and meet in the middle; in reality, one tends to race ahead while the other hesitates, becoming the spectator in the room.

The visitor slumped into the only comfortable chair, ghost-like under its dirty sheet, distracted by last night’s booze and the endless stream of images flickering across his phone. He hadn’t really looked up since his first introductory monologue. You could almost see the party invites and private views reflected in his pupils. Every so often, he’d glance up and say things like, “I love it,” “Keep going,” or “Do more!” These didn’t feel like platitudes exactly, but they didn’t feel like real engagement either. The takeaway seemed to be: “I like where this is going, where you’ve been, but it’s not really my thing.” Later, as I was driving him to the next opening, we stopped at a red light — and he got out at that one.

The next day, I was back at Frieze myself. The crowd felt like a sea of Argos level paparazzi — even if only for their own Instagram feeds — each visitor photographing what they agreed with. I thought about the studio visit and realised I was doing the same thing. I was looking for work that fitted my own values and aesthetics. I wanted confirmation — to see my careful mix of concept, art, and psychology reflected back at me. Here I was, pretending to discover new work but actually just wandering through the fair, searching for validation rather than encountering work on its own terms.

Why couldn’t I, as yesterday’s visitor seemed to suggest, judge the work by reading its history — by seeing how it had developed into something original, even if it wasn’t ‘my thing’? Why couldn’t I take pleasure in watching a work form its own language, one I could learn to read because it was teaching me how to see it? Would it be possible, I wondered, to move through an art fair and see each work in the context of its own world rather than my own — to bring curiosity instead of personal, cynical judgement?

Why are we all obsessed with defending our own set of values — insisting there’s only one way art should move forward, only one lens through which it can be understood? It mirrors how we see the world itself: we conform to freedom, but only our version of it. We all know there are hundreds of routes, hundreds of art worlds, yet we still insist on our way or the highway.

Art fairs should be the perfect opportunity to test this openness — a mirror of the art world, a hotbed of discovery and serendipity. But in practice, every element that could support real engagement is lost. The context is commercial, not academic. The atmosphere is like a crowded nightclub with great wallpaper, where you barely know the people you’re shouting at, not the quiet of a gallery where the work can breathe. No artist makes work to be shown at an art fair. The space rarely complements the work. The gallerists, understandably, just want to survive the weekend — financially and mentally.

It’s difficult to stay open when everything around you is closing you down.

And yet, despite all this, perhaps Frieze has given me more than it has taken. Through the fog of hangovers and hurried studio visits, I’ve stumbled upon a quieter, more generous way of looking — one that might just outlast the concept of the art fair itself.

Image : Eppo Doeve, The Chess Players, 1946 at Frieze Masters 2025 

Recently, someone failed to respond to a personal message that I had spent some time writing. I hadn’t spoken to them in a couple of years, but they had been an important part of my life, if only briefly. As time went by I started to get a creeping feeling of uncertainty, of being in limbo, helpless, suspended in anxiety — a feeling we’ve all grown used to, though it has become more prevalent and often tied to anxiety since we started using the internet as a kind of mirror. A mirror that doesn’t answer back, but instead presents us with heightened, often unwanted or unrealistic desires.

This unanswered desire, this creeping uncertainty, is a feeling artists know too well. It is a key essence of art-making: the uncertainty of which direction to go in, of whether what you’re doing has any value, how it will be received, if the work will ever be shown. Artists have to live in a state of constant uncertainty and delayed gratification. If they don’t accept this, they cannot fully engage in their practice. If they resist uncertainty, they often fall back on the rules of design or advertising, making art that fulfills a function rather than exploring unknown possibilities.

I think this feeling has deep roots in Western culture. The madness of endless productivity has trained humans to get used to absence and loss; the machine discards people. Think of how many people simply disappeared in war, or just walked out of a house — never to return. I think of the moment in The Grapes of Wrath, where Tom Joad leaves, simply disappears. In the narrative, it is to join the larger cause, the class struggle. But to me, as a teenager, it was just the raw experience of loss. I just couldn’t get over how you would build up a character like that just to dispose of him, metaphor or not.

In the 21st century, technology allows us to be found and tracked at all times, yet this very ease of connection has paradoxically increased loneliness and uncertainty. The easier it is to reach someone, the less we actually do. Could it be that we miss the real loss of someone — this feeling of disappearance that we have been socialized over the centuries to accept — so much that we’ve had to invent substitutes: ghosting, breadcrumbing, orbiting, submarining, or benching? In simple terms, psychologically weaponizing the act of disappearance.

I think artists who have trained themselves to live in this uncertain state are in a unique position to deal with it. They are disassociated from fixed aims and goals and can see uncertainty as a healthy, mindful state, turning it from fear, shame, or anxiety into a creative state of mind. But to do this, we first have to see it and label it as a natural part of the human condition — day-to-day life. We must be comfortable sitting in the darkness, knowing that no response may be itself a response, but also a mirror back to the original question, and that questions are sometimes worth asking, even without answers.

Image : Rachel Rose, Pitch Black Verdigris Green, 2022

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A Moment of Eternal Noise is a show on London Fields Radio that weaves together recent cultural discoveries by Richard Evans in a seamless aural collage.

On this show which is pre-recorded in the gallery FLAT:TWO we take a look at Concorde, suffragettes, lighthouses and a shipping forecast that involves Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.

Tracks, excerpts and samples include…

Concorde takes off
The Combine, John Maus
New York to London, inflight recording
Spitfire, Public Service Broadcasting
From the Air, Laurie Anderson
More Women, Saada Boonaire
Tokka, Agnes Obel
The Suffragettes, Pathe News
Memorial, Michael Nyman
Freedom or Death, Emmeline Pankhurst read by Emily Blunt
Get Thy Bearings, Bonobo
Swallowtail lighthouse bell
Rethikhly, Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer
Rain, Poppy Ackroyd
The life of a lighthouse keeper
Balladyna, Tomasz Stanko
Camera Obscura (1976 revision), François Bayle
The Shipping Forecast, Les Barker, read by Brian Perkins
Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hills), Brian Eno

If you are reading this as an email subscriber you can listen to the show either on the official London Fields Radio website….
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http://www.londonfieldsradio.org/mix/a-moment-of-eternal-noise-march-2018/
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Or on the A Moment of Eternal Noise Website…
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https://amomentofeternalnoise.com/