AS I TOOK HER ARM SHE STARED THROUGH MY FACE AT THE DARK BRANCHES OF THE TREES OVER MY HEAD was an exhibition I curated at Yellow, asking five other painters to be involved; Christiane Bergelt, Olarn Chiaravanont, Rasmus Nilausen, Catherine Parsonage and Ross Taylor. They are all painters whose work seems to me to have a direct relationship with words or writing or reading. This might be because of what I knew about them personally, about their practice, or what was obvious from looking at their work. I invited them to make new work for the exhibition or choose pieces that seemed relevant to the concept. If my research had previously been into writing about painting, then I wanted their help in approaching it from the opposite angle; how do we paint about writing?

I wrote an accompanying text; The Polycephalus which is representative of this research. The hypothesis of which is that the best writing to accompany an artwork is a work of fiction, narratives that exist in the world that the viewer enters when they encounter the artwork: texts written for paintings rather than about them. The world of this particular narrative was further inspired by interviews conducted with the five other artists in the months preceding the exhibition.