Avoided Spaces

Using the artist’s body in site-specific areas in London the photographic performances are made in places which held an emotional story.

The performance becomes a photographic pilgrimage with a set of polaroids developed in each place which refer to throwaway tests used in cinema. Each image becomes both photographic evidence and a cinematic ‘moving’ image implying that memory can be fluid and is open to change.

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Performance text 2007

I hunt for spaces, underpasses where I can stage photographs for my current project. I am both in the present, seeing a woman talking on her mobile, yet imagining a staged work. Suited men pass, chatting. I’m both here and somewhere else, I snap ideas, like a tourist.

I go to places I think I know.

A cobbled dead end in Shoreditch, another of those cold, steely late afternoons. A type of light I never get in dreams. This is visceral and present. A photograph can capture this grey, the film loves its flatness. In a striped jumper he forms cigarette smoke around who I am, was. I hear you’re taking ‘pictures’ ?

I work through areas of impasse. To relook, re-enact and hopefully find a way of passing through.

Yellow light on the city at night. A fox looks around the foot of St. Paul’s cathedral. He stares into the camera.
A flash of how the painter died, fell.

Was it in this light? I crush the thoughts out again but my camera wants to search it, make it, pass through it.

To return and look at an empty place.
Burnt.
In a dream.

Years now.
And now?

I go to places I’ve avoided.

Click and there …it is

The smallest movement on a Polaroid.
Made in the sun.

I look again and see something new in one of the prints, a piece of blue falling?

A trapped particle of light,
Icarus
or….
Simply light.

Re-looking at a photograph.
Really looking.

Then a washed out image.
OVEREXPOSED.

Burnt out, like a life thrown out.

Photographs of place as mementos.