I first met Mark Haddon in 1988 at Edinburgh College of Art. He was a year above me and even then, he was one of those students people talked about. My friends and I admired his work, not because it was flashy, but because it felt quietly sure of itself. Almost 40 years later, listening to Mark talk about his work, I'm struck by how consistent he's been. We live in a culture that demands neat artist statements and clear intentions, but Mark doesn't work that way. He notices things. Crumpled paper, bits of wood, discarded ribbon not as metaphors but as themselves. He said something that has stayed with me. The thing is always the thing. It sounds simple but it feels like the core of his practice. What moved me most in our conversations was when Mark talked about sharing a world with other human beings. That sense that the marks on a page, or the wear on a piece of wood are traces of lives already lived. His work feels generous in that way. Like an acknowledgement of others, rather than a claiming. He once used the phrase "mucking about" It made me smile. It sounds almost dismissive but I think it's profound. Great artists often look like they're playing. They experiment, they follow accidents, they allow things to unfold. What looks like mucking about is often deep attention built over years. Writing this, I realise I'm not trying to explain Mark's work as much as describe the consistency of the person behind it. The Mark I admired as a student, and the artist I listen to now, are recognisably the same. In a world that rewards reinvention, there's something deeply inspiring about someone who has spent decades simply becoming more fully themselves. There's a patience in Mark’s work, a sense that Making is thinking, that work doesn't illustrate an idea, it discovers itself in the doing. That attitude feels at a piece with No31, the gallery he runs, not as a career move, but as a space for attention, for slowing down enough to notice. This essay doesn't try to explain his work better than he does. It tries instead to honour a way of being with the world, insistent, unshowy, and necessary.
Mark Haddon is a Scottish contemporary artist, designer, curator and illustrator based in the Scottish Borders. Working across drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and found objects, his practice explores memory, place, observation and the relationships between natural and human-made environments. He is also the founder and curator of No31, an artist-run gallery and project space in Duns, Scottish Borders (markhaddon.net.)