These paintings arise from my work as a language teacher and contact with medical training that my partner, an overseas doctor was undertaking in the UK. The paintings make use of short texts lifted from a training manual listing appropriate language for bedside manner. The texts document familiar but impersonal words of concern and kindness: “You won’t feel a thing”, “Does it feel the same on both sides?” – language not far removed from modernist critique of American Abstract Expressionism. The colours are those of the packaging of Gaviscon indigestion tablets.

Nick Ferguson 1998