These are scans of my notebooks. For PA06 I started scanning my notebooks. I think I scanned everything I had up to December 2007. I thought I was going to make work that was based around them (as it happened, I did not use these scans in my work). In the last year of university, I got increasingly dissatisfied with the nature of making work. I would go to seminars with a few other people on the course every week to discuss where everybody's work is at the time, and be really annoyed that so many people would have an idea of something to photograph, then feel the need to work backwords from theory to images. I felt that there had to be something real driving the work, something other than the desire to tell Peter what he would want to hear, therefore (possibly) getting a good grade.

I didn't like being on a course where theorising meant more than producing work; I wanted the space to make something that had some real meaning for me, and I always felt that if a person works in this way they will not struggle to explain their work. Indeed, they would simply be explaining their work, rather than stringing together various ideas and words (words like "references") that might don't mean anything to the work just to please somebody else's idea of what work should be like.

So that's why I thought my notebooks would be a good starting point—it wasn't something I felt uncomfortable with; I wasn't choosing something that meant nothing to me.

In the end, anyway, my work for PA06 was EXTEMPORE, something made with pictures rather than words, but still something I felt comfortable with. I cropped the scans, and they are all slightly different sizes, so I didn't really know how to show the images on here... It looks a bit messy. These are a few of the pages from my notebooks.