I LIVED NEAR A SERIAL KILLER

A sensational title I know but it is actually true. Whilst staying with my parents this weekend I walked from the outskirts of the city into Gloucester and as I walked I remembered my bedsit there in the 1980's.

When I first left school I worked for a few years before going to college in Birmingham to study photography, and so I lived in Gloucester in 1986/7. My bedsit was in a big Victorian block on Belgrave Road, which was two roads up from Cromwell Street where Fred and Rosemary West lived. I regularly cut up Cromwell Street on the way to work and probably walked past the Wests or their children. They were charged in 1994, Fred with 12 murders, Rosemary with 10. Oddly a friend knew the psychiatrist assigned to Fred after he was arrested.

The picture is the only one I took on my walk. The scrambling plant is a pyracantha often called Firethorn, not because of it's colour but because it is a poisonous plant with toxic thorns that cause a burning skin rash on contact. The plant also produces hydrogen cyanide and the berries can be fatal if ingested.

I promise my next blog entry will be more uplifting!

Comments

A Lovely Pair of Pins

I knew the expression 'pins' referring to legs but had to Google what the Cockney rhyming slang comes from. It looks like 'pins & pegs', but there are some great alternatives like 'bacon & eggs' and 'dolly pegs'. I think I might start trying to incorporate more Cockney into my everyday speak, I do have London roots but they are more South (Saff) London than East London, where I think it originates. Anyway this is all to illustrate a new picture that sits quite neatly with an older picture. So brogues, legs and a sea view from my two main muses. This might be turning into a set... Oh by the way the top view is Morecambe Bay and the lower image is from The Wirral looking across towards Wales. The North West of England is a beautiful place, with some stylish residents.

Linda McCartney Video Commission

If you'd like to access my cyanotype video workshops, they are still live on The Walker Art Gallery website: Cyanotype prints for beginners Advanced cyanotype prints

Exquisite Corpse

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...

Marc Provins

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