On the shore that first day were ocean-pocked plastic buoys, steel oil drums, nylon rope, hemp rope. Planks of wood, some with traces of paint. Most plastic and glass objects had broken on the tide and been made round by the sea. Fishing nets, wire. A toilet seat. Stepping away from the beach: Pebbles, rock, then grass covered sand-earth, and further back gorse, tree, path and finally cottage. My house. Me, the almost-lord of this debris-strewn kingdom, this rock on the end of a rock on the end of rock on the end of the rock where home was. Memorialised days of endless sun, evenings long and cold. I kept food in plastic bags, quickly found compulsive routines. I did evening things by candlelight. Perhaps I would have enough hot water for a bath after struggling to light the stove. Long phone conversations with my wife. Long times staring into my stuttering fire behind the soot-frosted stove glass. I remember my thoughts, clanging within the boundaries of my mind like I clanged about on the island. I had nothing to do yet lived full, tiring days. I found everything where there was nothing to be found. Who was I? Another man. Every creative act remakes a person. The island remade me and since then my paintings of the island continue to remake me. I was there two years ago this May, but it could be twenty. If memories can be both clear and unreliable then so it is with my memories of my time on the island. Who was I? How was I? I was bored and I was busy. I was scared stiff at night and once in broad daylight on an even remoter side of the island when I was struck by my lonesome vulnerability. I was tearful at moments of beauty and poignance. I missed home yet didn’t want to return. I made nothing on the island that really moved with me, but dozens of paintings in the comfort of my studio since that somehow find the heart of those golden-hazed days. That island of sanctified memory. It is powerful magic to be out of one’s skin. Marooned in every way, I found the remoteness disembodying. Faced with myself I felt mostly lonely. I wonder sometimes if the work that has come afterwards forms a process of re-embodiment.