How Are You?
This was the first work I embarked upon after graduating in 2013 — at the end of seven complicated years that had asked a great deal of me. It has taken many forms since: born on the streets of London, interrupted by a pandemic that paradoxically gave the work new life, displaced by a move to Margate, and relaunched in 2025 with a clarity that only time and distance could provide. It is not finished yet.
“There are no excuses. You make art in any way you can. Materials are not a barrier — use what you can.”
My uncle Ernst Gottschalk said that to me in 1981, and I have never put it down.
The answer to the question is within the question. Mine was: what kind of work can I make when work occupies almost everything? The answer was the forty minute walk I was already making — each way, through the heart of London, past the Tate, over the Millennium Bridge, along Fleet Street. I passed the same people regularly. We never spoke. I made a card and tried to hand it out. The resistance was considerable. The unwritten code holds.
I was not entirely comfortable breaking it myself. The only people who had ever offered me anything on a London street were handing out discount sandwich vouchers or religious tracts.
The card said You Are Unique. It was a statement, not a question — which perhaps says something about where I was. The desire to connect, held at arm’s length. I have come to understand this as something close to the engine of my work.
Then the pandemic emptied the streets entirely. An unexpected gift — London to myself. Unlike most, I worked all the way through the pandemic and got to see London at low tide, if you like. And a then a question: what were the actual effects? Were there benefits? I didn’t want to make a point. I was curious. I changed the approach from an affirmation to a question. How Goes It? The project moved entirely online.
Then the tide turned – the streets filled — seemingly beyond what they had been before. The commute became a press of bodies, a competition for space and time. London had become yet further somewhere to endure. We needed air. By August 2022 we were in Margate. It took time to find my footing.
Eventually I did, and by April 2025 I was ready to tackle this project again, to ask the question again — simpler this time, stripped of any fixed moment. Simply: How are you? How were you? How do you think you’ll be?
The image above was made from the responses. There is a plan, in conjunction with East Kent Hospitals Charity, to install it as a mural at QEQM Hospital. An I will offer limited edition archival print.