Last year, I made a book. As often happens with creative undertakings, it has taken time and distance to understand how I feel about it, particularly because it’s shaped by very personal experiences. The work continues my photographic exploration of the city’s periphery: that liminal space just beyond the urban, but not yet rural. It also probes my own personal boundaries, made during a period of profound change in my life, what you might call a midlife crisis of sorts. As a wise friend reminded me, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , the original meaning of crisis is “a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent; a turning point.” This book is my attempt to make sense of that turning point: to explore what it means to be in my fifties, to be queer in my fifties, to inhabit an ageing body, to consider how others respond to that body, and to examine how I feel about how others feel about it. Walking, using that same ageing bo...
I've gathered this project together here, although it really just started as instagram posts and me keeping myself entertained/ creative through the early weeks of the pandemic. On reflection, although it looks visually different from my usual work (black and white rather than a focus on colour) the themes that emerge are similar. This is how I've made sense of it: These images are inspired by the exquisite corpse parlour game first played by the surrealists around the time of the 1918 pandemic. In my interpretation each picture is a self-portrait made up of my silhouette and graphic elements found on my Lockdown daily walks in the suburban landscape around me. Living alone I soon realised the only human form I was seeing on a regular basis was my own shadow. I started making these images using my phone camera and a selection of simple apps at the beginning of the first Covid Lockdown and continued until things returned to some kind of normality in mid...