Derek has worked in an arts, culture and education environment since graduating with a BA (Hons) Fine Art in 1986. As a practicing artist he has had studios across the North of England.

He taught at schools, colleges and universities before becoming a curator and exhibition designer working at a number of museums and galleries including Tate. As a contemporary curator he saw his role as more than just a custodian of collections but as a catalyst for developing and encouraging dialogue between the past and present. By creating these non-verbal conversations he became the intermediary between several diverse groups of people and created discussions that bridged gaps and removed barriers.

He initiated and conceptualised the Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival in 2010, which has grown from an annual one month event to a year round programme of exhibitions and commissions celebrating the breadth of artistic talent across the North West of the UK.

In 2017 he refocused his career and now returning as Notaword, Derek has produced a new body of work representing chance, risk, uncertainty and discovery.

Through his street photography he captures chance encounters and random incidents some of which are then printed on to layout paper.

His drawings, taken from his street photography, are detailed studies drawn on to archival tissue paper often using a 0.2 pilot pencil. Rips and tears in the paper are inevitable and also unpredictable thus creating a balance between tradition and expression, order and chaos.

He then pastes both his drawings and photographs on to a backboard, a process described by Derek as ‘like weaving with spiders webs’ creating an additional risk of damage or even total loss of the work. Working this way allows the medium a level of control on how the finished work will look, creating an element of chance to the outcome.

The rationale for this approach is to represent the unpredictability of memory and how this can be distorted and shaped by the viewers’ own experiences. Through his approach to drawing and street photography he documents a single moment in time, one line in a story that has no beginning or end and invites his audience to fill in the gaps. These potentially uncontrollable gaps exemplify the fragility of history and how the past can be individually reinterpreted.