Tunnelling In Again

West Nottingham, April 2019

I never cease to be thrilled by the immersive complexity of cities.  For a long time now, I've had a kind of fantasy about urban environments resembling vast living organisms through which one might move - like in one of those imagined scenarios where submarine explorers are shrunk to cellular scale and injected into someone's bloodstream.  Such tales always seemed merely a preposterous trope of the cheesier end of Science Fiction from my childhood [1.].  However, anyone who has experienced an endoscopic procedure involving the medical insertion of a fibre-optic device, will know that fact has rather caught up with fiction, these days.

West Nottingham, April 2019

Anyway this sense of the city as a complex amalgam of interlocking systems, networks, ducts and sinuses is always magnified whenever my camera lens is drawn into a city's subways and other subterranean spaces - as it often is.  

West Leicester, May 2019

Subways and tunnels have long held a fascination, and have certainly featured on here before, a few times.  These images include several of the latest crop - harvested recently, while considering the possible resurrection of a proposed video project on the subject, a while back.  I'm still not sure if that project will actually emerge into the light, anytime soon - although I have started shooting a bit more related footage, of late - so we'll see about that one.

What is notable is that the regularly photographed foot tunnels, and road underpasses have now been joined by subterranean and basement carparks, as a recurrent motif.  Psychologically, the implications of these might be subtly different, although I'm yet to fully analyse exactly how.  For now, they just seem to offer another opportunity to burrow into the hidden substrata of the city - either in reality, or by just imagining what might be around one of those descending corners

West Nottingham, April 2019

[1.]:  I want to imagine having watched at least one film based on this premise, as a child - the kind of thing Doug McClure would have inevitably starred in.  Anyone know whether or not I'm just making this up? 

Must The Speed Of Light Really Preclude Time Travel?

All Images:  Kings Cross-St Pancras Underground Complex, London, February 2017

Tunnels and passages have constituted a periodic sub-theme on here, being one of those categories of physical urban structure (like towers, bridges, etc) whose emotional or psychological resonance far exceeds their basic function.  It's no secret that, for years now, this essentially subjective/poetic approach to the urban environment has been almost my entire raison d'être, artistically speaking, at least.

Although it's never been a stated intention, it's fair to say that much of that vision has tended towards the entropic, the marginally dystopian, or at least toward finding poetry within the nominally mundane.  Thus, the tunnels into which my camera has been habitually drawn have tended to be those which seem to burrow into The City's more obscure, forbidding recesses, or which seem to lead back in time somehow.  Many also seem to speak of unrealised Utopias - of futures that never were, if you like.

This one, at first glance at least, would seem to offer egress to a far more inspirational vision of futurity.  It's a highly distinctive feature of the revamped Kings Cross-St. Pancras Underground complex, which I captured towards the end of a long day walking around London with my good friend Susie, earlier this year.  Even with aching feet and dwindling energy levels - we were compelled to linger for a moment in its uplifting radiance.  Indeed, this may be, I suppose, partly what the designers intended - the provision of a soothing, sensory balm for the jaded traveller.

There's something distinctly of the twenty-first century about the way this particular tunnel suffuses the pedestrian in light along its entire length.  Rather than leading one physically and symbolically toward (or indeed, away from) 'the light' as older conduits might, this one begins to transmute the entire material environment into a less tangible dimension - one in which masonry is replaced by photons.  As the more expressively manipulated of these images suggest, there's a sense of the tunnel's denizens becoming suspended in an increasingly virtual environment - in which sensory response is more important than actual physical location.  This definitely feels like something to which our current cutting-edge technologies would appear to aspire.

But, come on - you wouldn't expect me to leave such a roseate interpretation totally unmediated, would you?   Even whilst enjoying the obvious beauty of this subterranean spectacle, I'm also reminded of many of the popular science-fiction realisations of my youth.  There is more than a hint of, for instance, Dr. Who, or Star Trek, I think - and thus, of a future in which much of one's time might be spent striding along seemingly endless, over-illuminated corridors.  Something in that gentle curve suggests the USS Enterprise's superstructural disc, whilst the tunnel's clearly-visible modular structure seems to recall one of those TV budget-constrained alien complexes into which the good Doctor periodically time travelled.

It always felt a little disappointing to me that, for all their technological advances, the aliens (or indeed, the humans of the future) should favour a design aesthetic not so far removed in its sleek blandness from the average corporate H.Q.

Sinus Trouble (It's Draining, Men)

All Images: Clifton, Nottingham, July 2016

It's impossible to ignore the advantages of employment in Education, and an academic year punctuated by regular holidays - for any artist who also requires a day job.  Admittedly, it can lead to a slightly stop-start approach to creativity.  However, over recent years, I've learned to lay up as much groundwork and pre-planning during term time; in order to hit the ground running with whichever project I have in hand - as soon as the next block of really usable time appears.

This time round, I'm very much at the start of things - having drawn some form of mental line under the four strands of work that featured in last month's 'A Minor Place' exhibition.  The intervening weeks have involved the inevitable pause for artistic breath, and the physical readjustments attendant on commencing another school year; but also the tentative collection of material and weighing-up of possibilities for new artwork.

It's far too early to predict how things will ultimately pan out, but there are various trains of thought starting to coalesce.  One such involves putting far more emphasis on using writing as the starting point for a given project, and it was my intention to pay this some proper attention during the current Half Term hiatus.  How frustrating is it then - that I've spent the last five days laying on my bed with my head in the bucket of a really heavy cold?  It's far from life threatening of course - just a routine bout of 'Man Flu', really; but certainly enough to rob me of any energy or focus.  It is also the down-side working in schools, I suppose.  Looks like, as is usually the case - I can't have my cake and eat it.  

So, instead, all I've really had the energy or motivation to do so far, is to half-heartedly sort through my photographic archives, and write the last couple of posts from a semi-prone position.  Amongst the half-forgotten photos were these - commemorating a cycle ride I took into Nottingham's Edgelands, earlier in the summer.  They don't really relate to anything much, apart from a general interest in tunnels, subways and underpasses, but they do seem to chime with the images in my last post, both formally and, perhaps - psychologically.

There's clearly a spare geometry about all these images, - something I'd have to fight hard to keep out of so much of my work.  And they also display a similar tawdry banality - of the kind that so easily flips over into mild, dystopian glamour.  Indeed, I flatter myself the final one might be a still from a certain, slightly cliched, variety of Brutalist Science Fiction film.  To be honest, they're really not far removed from the kind of images I've generated before, on numerous occasions.

But, I'd be lying if I said there isn't a kind of persistent psychic resonance to be found in that idea of moving through darkness towards the light, and possibly - towards a dimension of greater promise beyond.  Let's face it, 'the light at the end of the tunnel'  is hardly an original idea - is it now?

So maybe, this and the previous post are really just a minor pictorial essay on having one's forward motion frustrated, and on being forced to struggle through the gloom for a while.  Today is the first when I started to notice the first signs of possible recovery and, as these images suggest - that I'm slowly moving towards the end of the tunnel, (just in time to go back to work - no doubt).

There - how's that for turning a routine episode of viral infection into a full-blown, self pitying, existential crisis?