Traveller: If you thumb through ancient copies of Flash Art or Avalanche... you will find no mention of our names...

And if you scan the walls of major galleries and museums... we will be notable... only by our absence...

But there is always reflection and hope...

For those of you old enough to remember Gallery House (next to the Goethe Institut), in the 1970's... or the CAS exhibition of 1989 in Covent Garden... we may just ring very distant, and slightly haunted, bells...

Why haunted you may ask..?

'Distant' may seem obvious... if distance is synonymous with the passing of time... but is it..?

We are both still alive, and therefore isn't the distance from our last appearance, to our next, only a matter of metres... or miles..? - in fact no distance at all, in a world of information touched by the touch of a screen...

If we'd fallen from grace we'd be bitter... but we left before any ordination could take place... biding our time, and lives, until the necessary technology arrived; technology that would allow the stories to be told, and the paintings to be painted, without the awkward breath of the old technologies - and our foetal ambition - clouding the glass...

Which is where the word 'haunted' shuffles onto our small stage...

We are here to re-introduce ourselves to a world that hardly knew we existed. We are both old and new simultaneously... placing pieces missing, for nearly 30 years, from the nation's walls, alongside the whisperings of more recent works...

Sometimes, the last pieces of a jigsaw puzzle... are a long time being found...

Although we were both born in Leeds in West Yorkshire in 1948... we didn't actually meet until 1981... - at The King's Head, in Islington, North London...

m z :
I moved to London by way of Brighton and Midhurst... ending up in Walthamstow in 1969 (in the shadows of William Morris and Ian Dury)...
So, although we met in 1981... (mainly through Elderly Brothers and Balham Alligators gigs)... we didn't actually start 'working together' until around 1989...

h s :
By that time I'd made quite a few exhibitions in London, at Situation and later PMJ Self’s, and had shown work in Zagreb, as well as an exhibition of drawings at Thomas Gibson...

m z :
...and I'd sold pieces at the Contemporary Art Society show in Covent Garden and at the Royal Academy Summer Show...

hs :
The early 'collaborations' between us were essentially just playful and diversionary, and I don’t think either of us took them too seriously... But as the years rolled by and we both developed our own ways and places of working, I think we both began to see the possibilities that the old playful ‘working together’ might bring to both our lives... - if we could work out, how it might work out...

mz :
I moved to Scotland in 1985, but we kept in touch occasionally, mainly with our own variations around the On Kawara’s postcard theme... but with a bit more information and stuff about the weather...(!)

hs :
I’d begun to find myself slightly disillusioned with ‘the art world’ and it’s workings. The finances at Situation Gallery were a mess, and then later on, Robert Self (then of the PMJ Self Gallery), finally proceeded to - no pun intended - self-destruct in rather spectacular fashion...

mz :
The move to Scotland was fantastically beneficial from a spiritual point of view, creating a viable and sustainable community in a relatively isolated part of the Westen Isles... but financially, and to some extent intellectually, it was less that satisfactory...

hs :
...and when I began to float the idea of leaving London, around 2001... to set up a working and living space in West Yorkshire...

mz :
...not getting involved in that, in some way... and finally - maybe - making something of ideas that had been kicking around for years, seemed too big an opportunity to just let slide by...

h s :
During the late 80’s and 1990’s we’d been in contact enough to still have a fairly good idea of what was going on in each other’s head...

mz :
...and we didn’t need to know everything. The ‘collaborations’ had always been much more about us having ‘separate ideas that somehow resonated’... even though our visual approach to ‘ideas’ is so different...

hs :
This meant that we could both carry on working in our own very different ways... and then get together to sift through various pieces... to see how different ideas might form a kind of 'partnership'...

mz :
A bit like a film maker might work with a musician... two different voices and heads, but combined to make an effective and individual idea (film)...

hs :
In any exhibition, the works could be hung together... but they also have their own individual existences, and could be shown or hung...

mz :
...or sold..!

hs :
...yes, or sold, as individual works...

mz :
In the end it was about working as individuals... but not alone...

hs :
Since setting up the space in Marsden and being physically 'related' to one another again, a slightly different way of working began to emerge which we both enjoy and both feel very positive about...

mz :
Although our own individual ideas have always resonated with each other over the years, it now seems possible to 'share' an idea in a way that somehow wasn't feasible before...

hs :
The two Recurring Landmark pieces are probably a good example...

mz :
The idea for those pieces came from an earlier piece by Howard called Green to Grey: Seven Miles... a painting based around a walk across the South Pennines near Blackstone Edge...

hs :
Introducing local stone - in this instance Coniston slate - into a variation on that painting seemed like a logical extension of the idea... but I also - we also - wanted to give the piece a wider context...

mz :
However wonderful the open landscape may be, there's an urban world of people and ideas, hidden within it... and we wanted to make a pair of paintings - a kind of extended dyptych - that would pull these two ideas of 'landscapes' together...

hs :
The physical, external landscape... and the internal landscape of people - that often finds expression in external ways...

mz :
through graffiti or carvings... or any other kind of 'mark-making'...

hs :
There may well be other ways of exploring these kinds of related but separate ideas as just one person...

mz :
but I think the fact that we're now able to bring two different, but closely related, sensibilities to an idea, is a great help in exploring all the possibilities 'an idea' might contain...

hs :
On a lighter note we've always found the almost random 'combination' of two seemingly unrelated objects, within some kind of 'simple' landscape or framework, intriguing... - though in fact some kind of 'relationship' between the objects involved nearly always emerges...

mz :
even if it is occasionally a bit 'obscure'...! But in the past the 'combination of objects' pieces have always been developed as one of my ideas... - in paintings like The Frog & Wine Glass... or The Bucket & Burning Bush...

hs :
But with something like the Fish & Magnet idea, I realsied that it was posible for me to explore the combination of these elements as well... in a way that hadn't seemed available to me in the past...

mz :
And by adding a third element to the piece - in making the 'actual objects' that were used in the painting - we could work on that part of the piece together - quite literally...

hs :
with one of us making the wooden fish... and the other the magnet... and both of us sharing the construction of the wood and glass display case..!

to be continued... sporadically...