When you press a sharp pencil into paper you begin a journey. Often in a moment’s absent minded doodling, that journey begins as a spiral. Whether the circles you make around that fixed point are increasing or decreasing may depend on whether your thoughts are spiralling away out of control or spiralling deeper within you. In a football match a spiral is a kick or a pass in which the ball rotates on its longer axis as it moves through the air. In economics an inflationary spiral will end in financial collapse.

 In 2008 and 2009 I found myself leaving my fixed point here in London to begin a journey that would circle the globe. I ended up living and travelling and drawing the great cities of the world, Mexico City, New York, LA, San Francisco, Tokyo, Bangkok and Cape Town. Most of that work  resulted in my 2009 show Time Out of Mind, a phrase I chose because it expressed for me both the physical sensation of the act of drawing, and because it summed up my exhilaration for the timelessness of the human activities that I was depicting: devotional worship, industry, and the pursuit of pleasure and love.  The rest of this work is here in this show that I have called Mind Out of Time.

The title of this show refers to the effects of disorientation and loss at the end of a journey that has had such a marked effect on me. To draw the people that I have had the opportunity to meet and to bring some fragment of them back here to my fixed point is a great joy for me, as I hope it is for  the people who see this work.   I began these paintings by drawing a spiral on the canvas with my charcoal. It was an unconscious move at first but as the work progressed it became the shape at the heart of this work.

In making this work I would like to thank Davide Mengoli and the staff of GX Gallery, my assistant Anne Noble Partridge, the film maker Michael Holland and my wife Ingrid.

Ed Gray, Bermondsey 2010