I first encountered a meditation by Marcus Aurelius in 1997 in Original Sin, a book written by P.D. James. There have been 18 different English language translations of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius published from 1634 until 2021. In 1998 I began making a series of acrylic paintings titled Punctuation in Translation, of each of the different translations of the meditation from Book 10.17. I painted only red punctuation marks floating on a dark grey-blue ground. The number of the meditation and the identity of its translator are included in the title of the work but the words are only available to the viewer if she/he uses this information to find the particular translation used in each painting. The text becomes invisible—what remains is a structure provided by punctuation alone.

I have been making works with meditations from Marcus Aurelius for about 25 years. Over this time period I selected four different meditations to make work in a number of different formats. The meditations I have used are from Books 2:17, 10.17, 4.35. 9.15 and 4.3.