ists entirely of the great jazz saxophonist’s name repeated 128 times around a set of visual forms that may
 or abstract, but which certainly suggest a metaphor for the musical forms of bebop in their realisation.
also be subject to change as they multiply: for example, in Klee, 2015 (p. 7), a list begins with the name of
ionist painter, Monet and morphs through word association variations before a visual snap with 'Chuck
 to the appearance of the name of another jazz great, Charles Mingus. It is altered through improvisation
s in visual phrasing, before returning to the original: ‘MINGUS, MINGUS, MINGUS, GIMNSU, IUGMNS,
INGUS, MINGUS, MINGUS’. Stravinsky, 2019 (p. 24) meanwhile, begins with an exhortation extemp-
Chuck Berry's 'Roll Over Beethoven', before settling into a familiar single word incantation.
s like this are also always pictorial, both in terms of the non-verbal marks they contain and the very rendition
d words. Although the word ‘apple’ is used overwhelmingly to create a verbal and visual sense of horror
le, 2021 (p. 9) – altered throughout as it is by differences in the case and pen used by the artist – there is
e in which it shifts through ‘apple’ to ‘apply, aptly, April, and Avril’. The names of musicians and especially
 artists loom large here. Often a single name repeated over and over in vertical lists, or a string of multiple
 little obviously in common other than that they come from art history: Vermeer, Cy Twombly, Degas, Klee,
arhol, Steinberg, Dürer, Pollock, Haring, Schnabel and Crumb. Rauschenberg’s name appears often,
st notably here in Our Paradise, 2006 (p. 19), at the centre of a fiery, expressionist explosion of forms and
e very intensity seems to threaten the existence of the work’s foamboard base. Interestingly, none of the
agists are namechecked, yet it is, coincidentally, often the feel of artists such as Jim Nutt, Carl Wirsum,
son and Roger Brown that comes to mind when viewing Sarkin’s work.
 because his technique approaches something like the pure psychic autonomism that was the holy grail of
eativity, Sarkin is reticent about revealing his methodologies even to himself: ‘Looking at my motivation … is
uctive. Thinking about why I do it is a waste of time really.' (Archer 2014) Act and thought are indivisible and
resent in the moment of making: ‘The things I wrote at the time meant something then,’  he says,  ‘But now
t it meant. It doesn’t matter what it meant, because thinking about what it meant detracts from what’s going
.' (Sullivan 2006) As a result he is loath to seek meaning in works after their completion, preferring to leave

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