The summer holidays during the schooling years were often spent travelling with my mother and brothers in a Volkswagen Beetle to visit my grandfather. He would spend his every spare moment making art, usually oil pastel pictures of fields and flowers, bluebells in spring, in vivid arrays of blues, crimsons and pinks, and nearly always on black paper. I would watch him create through his cigarette smoke. The paintings would line his living room walls. And my mother would paint too; grand sea cliffs and cathedral scenes. And I was entranced by some the ephemeral watercolours of an Irish painter, Mildred Anne Butler, who would focus on nature that surrounded her.

At the same time as I was making my own art I developed a keen interest in flying machines, an interest inherited from my father. The science of aviation began to intertwine with art; a combination of technology and the ephemeral. This combination was eventually explored through my architectural education in the UK where the technologies of construction were mixed with the philosophies of the arts and aesthetics. Architectural projects at university were always accompanied by paintings.

The works of Yves Klein confirmed that art making, for me, was at the junction between aesthetics and making space. Then a major revelation took place on discovering the often timeless aesthetic of the Japanese arts and architecture, which were for me light years ahead of anything in the west. I found myself in Tokyo on numerous occasions and would make repeated solitary visits on the bullet train to Kyoto and ultimately on to the southern tip of Japan a thousand miles away where small islands were situated in expansive seascapes, where houses had stood for hundreds of years, vulnerable yet strong in the face of typhoons. This experience was a new beginning, something I call zero.