Stephen and Lorna Kirin

After meeting at art college in 1986 we nurtured a friendship, our individual careers and respective family life. By chance, 30 years later, we united joyfully having found ourselves single again.

We now spend all of our time together, constantly looking at the world afresh and continuing to explore our individual art work too.

The opportunity to work in collaboration has been the most natural thing in the world for us and each piece surprises and fuels our passion. Whilst drawing on individual strengths, we respond to each other’s marks and concepts. There is no room for preciousness nor ego in our methods and it’s important that we preserve trust and absolute equality, as we pass each piece between ourselves. Through this, we have discovered an added shape to all our contexts, including our personal work. Our collaborative working methods, though suffused with individual elements, are never about the individual.

In the two years of our new beginnings, our work has evolved rapidly and is still changing. We explore historical themes as we respond to our place in a timeline, moving up and down it, drawing inspiration from the grand traditions of art, mythology, alchemy and so on. We seek collective input at all stages to take us beyond ourselves. We feel our art represents a part of who we are today and being together within that and our collaborative work is testament to this.