I returned to making paintings this year and remembered why I wanted to do that in the very beginning. A painting has the ability to be still yet moving at the same time. They don't need a gallery space. There is no narrative, no literature. I have always been fascinated by the visual dynamics and stillness of grids, and in these recent paintings I attempted to explore a lowering of the barrier 'between the arts of vision and those of language', the 'will to silence'. If, as Lucy Lippard claimed in her 1978 essay, Grids , they are 'emblematic of the modernist ambition', then maybe I am returning to being a modernist. If that's how 'discourse' wants to see it, that's OK. I prefer the ambiguity of Soren Kierkegaard: "Repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been: it is repeated backward, whereas repetition properly so-called is recollected forward."

Nicola Gray is an artist who has also worked as an editor for Third Text and for Documenta11. She has taught interdisciplinary summer programmes in Italy and the UK for the California College of the Arts, and has been a co-ordinator of the Braziers Workshop since 1998.