06/03/2019

The title 'Hobson-Jobson' comes from the classic Anglo-Indian dictionary printed in the nineteenth century. The phrase was originally a corruption of 'Ya Hossein!Ya Hassan!", which is called as a lament at the Moslem festival of Moharram. This became corrupted into Hosseen Gosseen, Hossy Gossy and ultimately Hobson-Jobson. It suits the exhibition because it's like the way an original idea becomes personalised - debased - from pure to personal forms, and because it starts off as Indian and ends up as English, like other pieces of Indian culture did.

When I opened my weighty parcel of paintings in the museum's chamber, I immediately realised that I had forgottten what the rpom looked like, forgotten it was cream, forgotten the arches and niches, and had been preparing paintings for a room that was white and regular. The creamy colour of the walls - a heritage paint concocted from seeds and sand - dulled the colours of my work, and the work looked too large and cumbersome to fit into the space.

The ten days it took me to adapt my work to the real live site is like the way I adapted to India - shock, despair, challenge, amusement, triumph. It was an exhausting time of putting-up, taking-down, arranging accidental encounters, quick successes and slow failures. In the end, I was delighted by what I had managed to do, and have learnt so much about the difficult art of hanging. Although I had visited the Museum some months earlier, I hadn't taken in its scale, and I had used an arbitrary size for all my images - 84 x 63cm, which doesn't relate to anything in particular.

But working like this caused me to do things I wouldnn't have been capable of doing before, so - I'm glad I got it wrong!