While living in London (2003 - 2004) I had little space to work and so I was forced to work on a small scale. Working in watercolour I find, is a good way to explore ideas quickly and still have the flexibility to use colour, texture and gesture; which are important common aspects of both painting and music.

I was exploring the possibilities of creating a 2 & 3 Dimensional musical language; returning more closely to the work that I was doing 20 years previously, but informed with the philosophies and formal obsessions of the intervening years.

The difficulties involved in creating a composition that makes sense visually while also making sense aurally are numerous - I found space / time being the most difficult to resolve. Musical compositions can last for hours with the same detail and complexity throughout, as a two-and-a-half minute composition; visually that can be quite a challenge!

Colour harmony, dischord and contrast; counterpoint; texture; structure; rhythm; even to some extent tempo are aspects of music which are also present in visual art; tempo could be seen in terms of how slowly or quickly a visual composition is revealed. However the time aspect of music has its equivalence in distance or space; music is linear, in time, but visual art is not genarally viewed as such.

One solution was to make work which was large enough and of a sufficient length that the viewer had to spend time in reading it from beginning to end; this also solved the problem of tempo. The difficulty with this linear approach is that visual art does not have an end point but moves back and forth, this was solved by making both ends 'return' into the composition. This is done by creating strong harmonic relationships which force the viewer to read back into the composition. The viewer then is forced to view the harmonic relationships like 'events' within the whole. This concept is close to the way some composers would think and is not unusual among 'Sonic Artists', which is more the tradition I percieve my own soundwork as being part of.