The title for this work was prompted by circumstances in which I found myself some years back during an extended period of time spent nursing a badly broken knee. As my art always, in one way or another, embraced the capacity of people to negotiate the bombardment of multi sensual experiences, as encountered in today’s environment, I found myself in a situation where the scope of experiences available to me was considerably curtailed while very basic domestic tasks had become major events in my life. I had nothing but time to explore the nature of such negotiations and the new perspective placed on it all by my unexpected predicament. The one legged nature of my perception altered the rules and shifted points of references causing regular meanings to falter which prompted the title for this work '“One of its legs is both the same”'. This title is the answer to the age old nonsense riddle '“What is the difference between a duck?'” which irritatingly poses an impossible question based on grammatical incompatibilities between itself and its physical realisation and can only be answered with an equally incompatible set of relationships that form this title. As the proposed image in this riddle does not work in any conventional sense, one is obliged to dismantle the riddle and examine its component parts, focusing in on individual words such as duck, between, difference, leg, both and the same etc, freeing their meanings from their normal grammatical strictures, in an effort to fit the proposition, resulting in something more likely to be found in the rarefied atmosphere of a quantum world than in the apparently more tangible world to which we are more accustomed.

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I have always been interested in the notion of an aesthetic as it was considered, pre Kant, by, among others, 18th century German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, first person to use the term “aesthetic”, and Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, also 18th century. This is a more empirical aesthetic perceived differently to the better-known aesthetic of beauty and the sublime in art. It was, as I understand it, concerned less with art and more with how people mediated their sense experiences in life into bodies of knowledge and belief and the part that that may have played, if any, in a collective consensus of values, mistaken or otherwise, on how the world should be perceived, understood and ultimately regulated. While our knowledge of the world has had to have always been firstly filtered through varying blends of the sensible, seen (read), heard, felt, tasted and smelt, experienced, in a sometimes orderly but more often random and disjointed fashion, before being reflected upon rationally and assessed for its use value, there exists here an idea that interests me out of all of this. Although not tested in any real sense and certainly open to debate, it is an idea that I'm entertaining here (one advantages of being a free-speculating artist rather than a grounded academic) that the aesthetic disposition could be part of an innate mechanism within everyone’s make up, not unlike Noam Chomsky’s innate 'Universal Grammar'. This fundamental sensibility enables us assimilate, evaluate and collate, out of the din of life experience, the whole range and diversity of our sense experiences, into a coherent, qualitative and projective imagination essential for negotiating all the complexities of the world we inhabit.

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I take the liberty of playing about with this idea of aesthetic, when considering my work, based on a premise that we all have that innate capacity to process and develop upon no matter what it is we are confronted with and are all capable of elaborating and building upon our encounters, in ingenious ways, that become intuitively part of our resources for future encounters. This is not art but it is a vital component of the human imagination which can easily become vulnerable and prone to manipulation under pressures to conform to the demands and conventions of our society. So, if nothing else, it is, I believe, one very important job for Art, to open up spaces that offer experiences and insights into all sorts of subject matter in ways, not otherwise encountered, that disrupt regular expectations and continuously excite that alertness in people to engage critically and look beyond obvious boxes for radical solutions to the complexity of challenges we all face today.

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So it is in this context and also within “the difference between a duck” that I assume in my work that everything and everybody, no matter how familiar or impossibly remote they may be to each other, are, within the realms of human sensibilities and thought, always potentially engaged in some form of active encounter, dialogue or choreography. These encounters can vary hugely in their nature depending upon the nature and diversity of everybody and everything else that comes into that mix. They can be as remotely diverse from each other as, for example, a piece of fluff, in the corner of a room, might be to '“The Thoughts of Chairman Mau”' might be to a duckbilled platypus might be to someone just waiting on a bus, who is already navigating many similarly diverse encounters in their own everyday life. The potential multiplicity of such encounters and cross-encounters, where ideas are always lurking within spaces between, I believe, if fully appreciated, creates an almost endless terrain for new permutations and possibilities, which can uncover many gems of inspiration and every now and then turn up some ground breaking revelation. It is not, necessarily, from art itself or even from artists that the best ideas are most likely to come, nor does it have to be, but it is art in all of its forms, when it is at its very best, and it is artists, I believe, that venture furthest to cracking open that kind of ground that is most conducive to such dynamic and productive exchange.

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In my work I try to seek out such spaces by upsetting expected arrangements of what is familiar, partially familiar and completely unfamiliar. The title “'One of its legs is both the same”' is a working title, which happens to be in a kind of sympathy with the paradoxical nature of this work, and covers a number of different series.

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•In one series 'Leontine' I have taken a number of watercolours, that I have in my possession, which were painted by an ancestor, Leontine, my great grand mother, while at school in Paris in the mid 1860s, who later lived through the 'Paris Commune', and I have digitally integrated elements of these pieces with a diversity of images of completely unrelated, self-contained objects, diagrams, ideas, symbols and anything at all that falls within a capacity for human reflection, photographed, sketched and scanned, googled and generally misappropriated from any and every source and period in history, limited only by my own limitations at diversifying further. I set them into formal compositional relationships that attempt to exploit voids in their coherence as gaps seeking to be filled by unforeseen connections drawn from associations made by others.

•In another series 'Overload' a debris of designs, plans, proposals, calculations, instructions, and other evidence of a thinking and contriving world, trawled from the same sources as above, are freely superimposed, in the form of drawings, diagrams, maps, scribbles, notes etc, one on top of the other into large format digital prints in which priority is given only to their value as abstract devices in overloaded compositional arrangements.

•In a third series 'Choreographies' similar combinations are again explored and developed further in a series of abstract paintings / montages in which the individual devices are representationally charged, each possessing their own autonomous content of one sort or another, taking up position in a kind of latent choreography with each other, waiting to be triggered into active dialogue by an audience.

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Although they differ one thing that is common to each of these series is an effort to tap that innate aesthetic by inviting new readings from the negotiation of unanticipated associations.

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Joe Hanly