How did your artistic practice change after moving to Istanbul? In what ways did the city’s layered history and physical texture begin to seep into your work?

I think the first way Istanbul changed the work was materially. I began experimenting with the stuff around me, like baklava trays, insulation boards, car paint, industrial varnishes, pigments, things like that. These things already felt like they had a story or a purpose before I even touched them. Then there’s the pace of Istanbul, which is quite hard to keep up with. Conversations are fast, decisions happen quickly, buildings disappear and streets can suddenly be hidden behind construction hoarding. The word gecekondu, meaning “built overnight,” stuck with me because it fits that attitude perfectly. So the work became more physical, more layered, and I suppose more reactive. The trays, the paint, the sanding, and the rubbing back all reflect the feeling of the city, built quickly, repaired constantly, rough around the edges, and always changing. I’m not trying to depict the city literally, though. It’s more that living here has changed how I see materials, as things with their own latent potential, able to shift, adapt, and become something else.

The title “Concentrate” suggests both a mental and physical intensity. Why do you think “focusing” has become a political or even resistant act today?

I’m always a bit cautious about calling focus an act of resistance, because it can make it sound much more heroic than it really is. But I do think attention has become a very hard thing to protect these days. Everything is designed to interrupt you. You sit down to do one thing and suddenly there are messages, emails, videos, notifications, and some algorithm trying to pull you somewhere else. Even watching a whole film without checking your phone can feel like an achievement, which is pretty bleak. With Concentrate, I liked the double meaning of the word. It suggests focus, but it also means something physically condensed, something reduced down and made stronger. That connects to the work because the pieces are compressed and pushed into a much denser state. So I wouldn’t call focusing political in any grand way. But staying with something, giving it time, and not constantly moving on feels important now. Maybe it feels valuable now because it’s become so rare.

In your works, the surface never appears to be merely a surface; it almost transforms into a field of memory. Do you see the surface as a form of recording?

When you work this way, the surface always ends up recording everything you do to it, whether you like it or not. Even when you cover something over or sand it right back, it doesn’t really disappear. It leaves a trace in the material. I try to load the pieces with a lot of information, and then I begin the process of revealing it again. But I don’t want everything to be exposed. Some of it stays buried, some of it is only hinted at, and some layers interact with each other in ways I can’t fully predict. Other things might only appear much later as the work wears or changes over time. So the surface becomes an ongoing record, but it isn’t a neat one at all. It’s much more like something that has been left slightly unresolved. In that sense, the surface is a recording, yes, but an inherently unreliable one. It remembers things, just not necessarily in the right order.

Processes such as layering, compressing, melting, and erosion are central to your practice. For you, is transformation itself more important, or the traces that transformation leaves behind?

For me, it’s mostly about mimicking natural forces rather than copying natural forms. I’m not trying to make something look like a rock or a fossil. I’m much more interested in borrowing the kinds of processes that might make one, only speeding them up in the studio. I set up systems that I can control to a certain point. I choose the materials and the conditions, but once the process starts, I’m never fully in charge of the output. The materials begin to behave in their own way. They react, resist, collapse, and reveal things I wasn’t expecting. Transformation is important yes, but mainly because of what it leaves behind. It produces results I couldn’t have planned directly. I like that balance between control and accident.

Has your architectural education influenced your perception of space? In particular, how did it shape the site-specific installation in this exhibition?

The installation was fun because it gave me the opportunity to think architecturally again, not just about the individual works but about the whole space around them. With architecture, you’re always thinking about how people move, where they pause, what they see first, and how the space changes as they pass through it. At university I was really into Carl Andre, especially the Equivalents works and the way his sculptures sit directly on the floor. They are so simple, but they completely change how you behave in a space. Some of his works were meant to be walked on or moved around, but people often feel uncomfortable doing that. I liked that tension because suddenly you’re not just looking at a sculpture. You become aware of your own body, your hesitation, and all these invisible gallery rules about what you’re allowed to do. For this exhibition, I liked being able to guide the viewer a little. Not in a controlling way, but by shaping the rhythm of the room. There are moments of compression and release, where you are brought closer to something and then allowed to step back again. That is a very basic architectural device, but it is still effective, especially in a gallery.

Your works exist in a hybrid space between painting and sculpture. Which discipline do you feel closer to, or has that distinction become meaningless for you?

I will always think of myself as a painter, even if the work keeps making that distinction feel less straightforward. I’m still thinking about colour, surface, composition, and how an image holds together. That part hasn’t gone away at all. But the way the works are made is much more physical. They’re built up, beaten about, and treated like objects or fragments. They have depth and weight, and the thickness of the edge becomes important too. So they’ve always sat somewhere between painting and sculpture, which feels quite natural to me without having to force a distinction between the two. Thankfully, I’ve heard that we live in a post-medium moment now anyway, so I don’t think we have to worry about those categories too much anymore. They’re useful words to organise things, but they’re not borders. I suppose I’m closest to painting in my head, but in the end it’s all just stuff, whether it’s two millimetres thick or two metres.

How does producing work in Maslak Auto Industry Site affect your practice? Does the surrounding environment directly infiltrate your works?

I must admit, I have a real love-hate relationship with Maslak, because to be honest, it can be pretty chaotic. Some days it really drives me mad, but it also has this very direct, unsentimental energy that definitely finds its way into the work. I use car paints and materials from that world, so it’s not just some vague connection. It’s right there in what I use and how I use it. I like being around people who are solving practical problems all day, even when the place is exhausting, because it stops the work becoming too precious. There are cars there that would almost certainly be written off in the UK, but in Maslak someone will still find a way to make them work again. That says quite a lot about the place. Nothing ever feels completely finished or beyond use. So yes, the environment definitely infiltrates the work in a very literal way. It shapes the finished pieces through the materials I bring in, but also through that slightly rough logic of the place.

Are the repetitive physical processes in your practice — sanding, compressing, melting — meditative for you, or do they feel more like an exhausting struggle?

It’s probably both, to be honest. The processes can be exhausting, but I do fall into a kind of trance when I’m making them. Because the actions are so repetitive, your mind starts drifting off a bit. I’ll find myself thinking about the next piece, or suddenly seeing the current one from a slightly different angle and wondering why I’m even making it in the first place. But it certainly isn’t relaxing. It’s more that your hands are occupied and your mind starts moving around on its own. Sometimes that is where new ideas start to appear. Then, of course, there’s the other side of it. It’s often tiring and frustrating, and it makes an enormous mess. You can spend hours getting something close, then push it too far in one small moment and have to deal with the consequences. So yes, it can be meditative, but not in a peaceful way. It gives me space to think, but it also makes me work for it.

In contrast to the rapidly consumed images of today’s art world, your works demand time from the viewer. What does the idea of slow looking mean to you?

It’s strange, because I spend so much time staring at these works as they slowly change that I often stop being able to see the change myself. It’s a bit like watching your kids grow up. You know it’s happening, but because you’re looking every day, you don’t really notice it in the moment. Slow looking, for me, often means looking into the history of a thing, not just its final appearance. So with these works, I hope people might spend enough time with them to sense that they have been through something. Not necessarily to understand exactly how they were made, but to feel that they have come from somewhere. I suppose I’m interested in that sense of before and after. Where the work might have come from, and what it might still become. It doesn’t give you all of that at once, but if you stay with it for a moment, it might start giving you a few clues.

In the “Concentrate” exhibition, is there a particular detail or feeling you especially hope viewers will notice?

I think I’d like people to notice the sense of seismic shift in the works. That is what holds the exhibition together for me. They are made from these compressed layers of material, and then something seems to move or buckle within them. That definitely comes from living in Istanbul as well. I grew up in England, where earthquakes felt completely abstract, like something you saw in diagrams or disaster films. Then you move here and suddenly the ground is not such a stable idea anymore. So rather than one particular detail, I hope people sense that instability. The works are static, obviously, but I want them to feel as though something has shifted inside them, or might not have settled yet. That sense of hidden movement is the thread running through the exhibition.

What has producing art in Turkey given you that differs from working within Western art circles?

In terms of producing work, Turkey has given me a very practical kind of freedom. There are materials everywhere, and whole areas of the city where you can find almost anything you need. Online shopping can still be a nightmare for industrial things, so learning Turkish has made a big difference. Sometimes you just have to bend your head around a workshop door and try to explain what you need. That can still be awkward, obviously. There is always a moment where you realise you sound slightly mad. But quite often you find people who are not just willing to help, but actually excited to be part of it. That hallederiz attitude has been really important for me. We’ll sort it. We’ll find a way. It is very different from more formal systems where everything has to be quoted, scheduled, and made official before anything can happen. Here, the process can be chaotic, but it can also feel much more open.

What was the most challenging aspect of producing the works in this exhibition?

The biggest challenge was the sheer physical effort involved. These works are much more labour-intensive than they might first appear, and there is an enormous amount of preparation behind every stage. For the last few months, I worked with a studio assistant, Zach, and without him there is no way I would have finished everything in time. There are so many repetitive, practical jobs involved before the works even begin to take shape. You spend a huge amount of time getting things ready, moving cumbersome pieces around the studio, and dealing with problems the moment they appear. People don’t often see that unglamorous part of the process. It’s difficult to explain just how much invisible labour sits behind the finished pieces. So yes, the hardest part was probably the scale of the making itself. Everything took longer than expected, made more mess than expected, and demanded more hands than I had.

Do you see an invisible connection between your childhood in Birmingham and your life in Istanbul today?

Yes, there’s definitely a connection, although I probably only understood it properly after being here for a while. Growing older gives you perspective anyway, but doing that in a foreign country gives you a physical distance too. You start to look back at your own memleket differently, with a bit of nostalgia maybe, but also with more clarity. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time helping my dad around truckyards and industrial spaces, so that environment was familiar to me long before I moved to Istanbul. There is definitely a strange connection between that and working around the oto sanayi here. Istanbul is very different from Birmingham and the Black Country, but both places have that practical, slightly rough way of keeping things going. There is also this idea, in both places, that your worth is measured by how hard you work. That connects directly to the alın teri cans in the exhibition. “Sweat of the brow” feels close to the kind of labour I grew up around, and to the kind of making I’m surrounded by here.

Looking back now, what would you say to Tom Fellows, who moved to Istanbul in 2010?

Oh shit, I always struggle with these kinds of questions. I think I’d probably tell him not to worry. There are plenty of people here just like you, even if it might not feel like that at the beginning. You will find your way around, you will eventually learn Turkish, and yes, it will still be pretty terrible, but much less terrible than it is right now. I’d tell him to walk around the city as much as possible, and let it really get under his skin.