In 1989, I staked my future on an act of deliberate absence. A quiet withdrawal from the London art scene, a conscious bet cast on the roulette wheel of artistic fate. After Goldsmiths in the summer of 1988, faced with the familiar siren call of the art market and the imminent seduction of the white cube machine, I chose instead to disappear into a self-imposed exile. Not a retreat from art, but a carefully orchestrated suspension, a period in which the relentless pressures of galleries and career paths were transformed into quiet subversion.

From 1994 to 2015, my work lived in the interstices of visibility, My Digital Boîte-en-valise emerged as a repository of ideas protected from the corrupting glare of public consumption. I deliberately shrouded my practice, telling friends I had given up art, curating my own timeline outside the maelstrom of commerce, ensuring that each piece retained its unadulterated conceptual potency. In this storied silence, I tinkered, I experimented, allowing the latent energies of painting, text, and digital objects to coalesce without interference.

There have been moments, a few carefully chosen instances, when I have allowed a sliver of this hidden work to surface. In 1992, at Karsten Schubert Ltd, under the curatorial eye of Michael Landy, I chose to exhibit work from my student days rather than my new discoveries. In 1994, at the Tyler School of Art MFA graduation show, I staged an irreverent spectacle: works were deliberately obscured, their presence felt more in absence than in display. These were not concessions to the art establishment, but tactical interventions, moments when the clandestine met the public in brief flashes hidden in plain sight.

This is not a narrative of abandonment, but of strategic concealment, of a prolonged delay in which discovery is made away from the banal imperatives of the market. My withdrawal was an act of resistance: a refusal to allow my research to be diluted by external validation. I remain committed to emerging on my own terms, to challenging the present with art that is rare, elusive, and uncompromising.