Fitzroy House is an important building in Lewes, but it’s easy to miss. You walk past it, or you know it’s there, but you don’t always go in. Over the past five years I’ve held exhibitions of my work here most years, so I’ve spent a lot of time in the building. Gradually, I’ve come to understand just how special it is.

It was once a library, and it’s said that Virginia Woolf spent time here. She even mentions it in her diaries. You feel some of that when you’re inside, but not in any grand way.

My practice explores musicality as a way of seeing: it is about rhythm, repetition and traces.

Through photography and painting, I attend to marks in landscape and still objects. I like to explore fragments, palimpsests, and the beauty to be discovered in chaos and decline.

When I’m walking and photographing in the landscape - I mean really feeling it and truly looking, rather than perhaps simply documenting it - I begin to see it as a surface to be felt and remembered.

In 1990, a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was travelling through Poland with my Canon F-1. The camera had a removable top shoe with a plate-glass viewfinder, which allowed me to photograph scenes discreetly.

I make paintings, drawings, photographs and books from a simple daily practice, most often a walk in the South Downs near my home in Lewes.

This essay began as a talk I gave recently in my home town of Lewes titled Creativity, Community & Me. It was the first time I’d spoken publicly about my own creative journey - one that has taken me from self-doubt and detours to the relief of finally accepting something I wish I’d known, or had the wisdom to believe, at the age of seven:

After 21 years of trying, I completed my novel, The Many Truths of Josef Batten.