Fudge graduated from Goldsmiths College, London, in 1988, despite destroying all his student work on the eve of his graduate show, an act inspired by a Duchampian thought-experiment which asked "what if an artist just disappeared?"[3]
Shortly thereafter, Fudge "went underground";[4] moving to the United States with his then-wife, the radical poet Tracy Angel. He received his MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[2]
For the twenty-five years that Fudge remained in self-imposed exile from the art world, he made and kept his ongoing work in secret, showing his paintings and digital works to only a few other artists and close friends.[1][4] He began creating digital artworks in the early 1990s when he found a Macintosh Classic II in a thrift store in Montana and, sharing it with Angel who used it to write her poems, taught himself the graphics software of the day.[2] He claims that his entire digital oeuvre is still stored on outmoded macOShard drives, almost impossible to access using modern laptops.[1] The Berlin-based art critic and curator An Paenhuysen has described these works as "post-internet in the way that [they use] the tools of the Web to create an object that in the end exists in the real world. The long incubation period of the work (1994–2015) [as an] editable digital image file... shows no trace of work over a period of time... As such, Fudge's prints are simultaneously dated and futuristic. They are modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern, all in one".[6]
Fudge's oil paintings display a deep understanding of the Modernist canon; borrowings from, and reimaginings of Cubist or Abstract Expressionist works are made to question painting itself as against digital-age hyper-imaging with its easy image editing and erasure.[1]
His sculptural works include exquisitely crafted faux luxury products and art supplies Branded "Fudge"; "Old Masters Soaps" (soap bars upon which have been painted exacting reproductions of Rembrandt sketches), and "Picasso Drive", a crushed Citroën C4 Picasso permanently installed at the Observer Building in Hastings.[7]