Pretty, Vacant 1

West Leicester, April 2020

Like most folks just now, I really value my occasional little trips out of the house under the guise of 'statuary exercise hours'.  Of course, regular circuits around my local environment, with bike and camera, have long been a part of my creative process - so little has changed there, really.  The bike is, by it's very nature, a kind of social-distancing device, and also allows me the opportunity to accelerate rapidly away from any potentially viral congregations I may encounter.  There also seems little harm in pausing for the occasional mini photo-shoot - providing I'm not impeding anyone else's isolated progress.  In certain situations, there's even some benefit in no longer having to wait for traffic or a crowd to disperse, before I can get my shot.  Whilst clearly unsustainable, and hardly a situation to be celebrated - some days it can almost feel like this crisis was designed for us slightly introspective flaneur types.

One (admittedly selfish) downside, is that the large construction sites I've been regularly visiting, in recent months, are largely at rest now.  On most sites, work has markedly slowed - if not ceased altogether, and there's a limit to how often even I can photograph the same unchanging chunk of steelwork, or expanse of unpopulated scaffolding.  The same old circuits can start to pale a bit too, when one is trying to combine a bit of much-needed exercise with equally vital mental/visual stimulation.

As a result, my latest excursions have seen me increasingly varying my routes, and the photographic subject matter has inevitably started to re-diversify as a result.  Except that, of course, the latest crop of images you see here, is still very representative of the kind of thing I've been drawn to all along - when not staring at building sites.  If anything, these blank windows and vacated commercial premises hark back to the stuff I was fixating on around 2016 - and which culminated in my contributions that year's 'A Minor Place' exhibition, with Andrew Smith and Shaun Morris.  My concerns at that time focussed on ideas of absence, vacancy, lost voices and forgotten meanings, and it all gave me massive scope to indulge my love of vestigal marks and emptied-out imagery.  The largely neutral palette of these shots seems to chime with that too.

'Untitled (Change of Use)', Mixed Media on Paper, 30 cm x 30 cm, 2016

'Vestige 5', Acrylics & Mixed Media on Panel, 60 cm x 60 cm, 2016

Central Leicester, April 2020

Back then, the regular evidence of such subject matter which I found in the field, seemed to represent the seemingly perpetual backwash of 2008's economic crash, and the ideology of Austerity that persisted in its wake.  In the context of this latest catastrophe (Capitalist, or otherwise), such motifs seem to acquire a renewed relevance.  It's always tempting to think one should be working with great urgency, on some definitive new response to any major societal event - but it occurs to me, there is a danger such actions can end up feeling hastily conceived or insufficiently digested.  Perhaps then, it's just as valid to dig out existing work, to check whether some new relevance may have accrued, whilst reflecting on events as they unfold.  If nothing else, it might be instructive to shift a few boxes, and have another look...