Something in the Signals collection arrived before Ian understood it. The forms emerged instinctively, away from the scale and pressure of his Manchester studio, painted in a quieter space in the English countryside where there was, as he puts it, nothing to perform. It took time before he began to understand what they were saying, and even now he holds that understanding loosely.
What he has come to recognise is that each Signal carries a single organic presence. Not human, not animal, but unmistakably alive. Some are rooted, weighted to the ground with the particular heaviness of something that cannot leave, that strains against its own fixedness. Others have broken free entirely, suspended in atmospheres that don’t belong to any recognisable time or place, perhaps beyond it. There is a recurring tension in the collection between these two states: the unbearable weight of being held, and the vertiginous freedom of release.
Where these feelings originate, Ian won’t say, and not out of evasion. The work genuinely precedes the explanation. There are traces of a life in it, of experiences that leave their mark without announcing themselves, but Signals does not illustrate a biography. It surfaces something older and less nameable.
What Ian does know is that the collection matters to him deeply. Not for its scale or its materials, but for what it asked of him and what it gave back. When people tell him how these paintings make them feel, he considers that the truest measure of whether the work did what it was meant to do.