Oscar Murillo: 'Violent Amnesia' At Kettle's Yard, Cambridge

Disclaimer:  

This post has been far too long in the writing - for which, apologies.  The exhibition it discusses - Oscar Murillo's 'Violent Amnesia' , at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, actually ended around two weeks ago.  However, with another show currently on in London, and a lot of attention pertaining to his Turner Prize nomination, Murillo still feels very much like a man of the moment, just now.  And to be honest, work like his is, in my opinion, worth discussing at any time.  The Cambridge show certainly whetted my appetite for Murillo's oeuvre, and has inspired me to try to visit his London exhibition in the coming days.  Perhaps this post will do something similar for you...  

Oscar Murillo, '(Untitled) Catalyst', Oil & Graphite On Canvas, 2018-19
(Detail Below)

The painter and multi-disciplinary artist, Oscar Murillo seems to be gaining plenty of recognition, just now - and for pretty good reasons, in my view.  Recently, I found myself at his recent 'Violent Amnesia' exhibition, at Kettle's Yard, in Cambridge's, with my friend, Tim - and came away feeling invigorated by what we saw.   

Oscar Murillo, '(Untitled) Catalyst', Oil & Graphite On Canvas, 2018-19
(Detail Below)

Oscar Murillo, '(Untitled) Catalyst', Oil & Graphite On Canvas, 2018-19
(Detail Below)

Murillo is an ex-patriot Columbian artist - from pretty humble origins, it would seem.  He studied in Britain, following his family's relocation, and has continued to made something of a base for himself here.  However, as would seem to be the case with many artists, these days, he seems to wander the globe relentlessly - seeking creative impetus, making cultural and conceptual connections, and collaborating, wherever it seems most appropriate to do so.  Certainly, ideas about migration, displacement, the complex and fluid, relationships between physical and mental territories - and about the friction between community and globalisation, all appear to form key thematic underpinnings to the work.  Indeed, Murillo has talked quite openly about borders, and the physical domains they delineate, as something he experiences largely through the window of a plane - his ideas and emotions flowing more universally, on the way to somewhere else.  If nothing else, the wide-ranging scope of his practice feels like a inspiring antidote to the growing and depressing trends of  nationalism and intellectual or imaginative restriction - against which any self-respecting artist must surely stand opposed, these days.     

Oscar Murillo, 'Violent Amnesia', Vinyl Cut Letters & White Paint On Wall
(Site Specific), 2019

The Cambridge show alluded to this early on.  The first, eponymous piece encountered, was a text-based memorial to a dead friend, which pleased me greatly with its use of vinyl cut lettering, applied directly to the wall - and partially obscured by a slew of gestural white paint.  However, that almost feels like an adjunct to the main show, which really began with a forbidding curtain of dark, roughly collaged canvas pieces, obscuring one's view of the work beyond in two directions.  This was actually the first instalment of Murillo's long-term project, 'The Institute Of Reconcilliation', which reappeared throughout the exhibition, at recurring intervals.  Here, it seemed to serve as a physical, as well as a visual obstacle to be overcome - suggesting to the seeker of artistic refreshment, "You must struggle to make any progress here."  Is this not also, in essence, the all-too-common experience of that quintessential twenty-first century figure - the migrant?     

Both Images: Oscar Murillo, '(Untitled) Catalyst' Paintings, With 'The Institute Of Reconciliation'
(Installation), Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, June 2019

Behind this, in one room of the impressive new Kettle's Yard exhibition space, hung a thrilling suite of Murillo's ambitious '(Untitled) Catalyst' paintings, alongside another phase of  'The Institute of Reconcilliation' (combining more tattered canvas drapery, damaged church pews, and a concoction of burnt corn and clay).  The latter appears to employ culture-specific references to the Colombian working classes, amongst other things, and is engaging enough.  However, with my painter's hat on - I'd be lying if I didn't admit it was the 'Catalyst' pieces that really blew me away, in that particular gallery.   

Oscar Murillo, 'The Institute Of Reconciliation', Oil On Canvas, Steel Rail, Church Pews,
Burnt Corn & Clay, 2014 - (Ongoing)

It occurs to me that it's increasingly rare to encounter this kind of ambitious, freely expressive, abstract painting in a contemporary exhibition, nowadays.  Nevertheless, it's still one of the most profound thrills in art, to be confronted, all over again, with someone's attempt to discover exactly how paint might get from one edge of a flat surface to another, with energy and verve.  Walking into this room was, for me, an experience not too far removed from that of engaging with Gerhard Richter's timeless 'Cage' suite, at Tate Modern.

Oscar Murillo, '(Untitled) Catalyst', Oil & Graphite On Canvas, 2018-19

Like much of my favourite painting of this kind, the 'Catalyst' pieces manage to combine  overall simplicity (at first sight), with almost infinite, multi-layered complexity - revealed as one stares into their depths.  Composed of tangled overlaid networks of scribbled marks, and broader veils of dragged colour, they achieve an imposing degree of monumentality, whilst also operating on a very human scale by obviously recording of the gestures of the hand and arm.  Indeed, they relate us to our infantile, attempts at clumsy, intuitive picture-making, even as they exist as mature and deeply reflective paintings.  This is, of course, essentially what the Abstract Expressionists were attempting, seventy-five odd years ago.  It's exhilarating to witness it being revived as an approach, with such verve and commitment, so deep into the Twenty-First Century.

Oscar Murillo, '(Untitled) Catalyst', Oil & Graphite On Canvas, 2018-19
(Detail Below)

That these paintings constitute a related series is evident not just from their shared and restricted palette of reds, blues and blacks (somewhat reminiscent of ball-point pens - I now realise), but also from the method of their execution.  It transpires that Murillo's method here involves laying one canvas over another - loaded with paint, before scribbling through from behind.  They are thus a species of turbo-charged mono-printing, as much as they are paintings in the traditional sense, and clearly evolve out of each other.  That the list of media employed includes graphite, emphasises that they are also drawings as much as paintings (if all that tangled calligraphy hadn't already proved the point).  It's no secret that I'm a sucker for a good series - and for such hybridised forms of media-transference.  

Oscar Murillo, '(Untitled) Law', Oil, Oil Stick & Graphite On Canvas & Velvet, 2018-19
(Detail Below)

Murillo's willingness to flit between modes of expression, even within the arena of wall-based picture-making, was underlined in the neighbouring gallery.  The paintings exhibited here combine much of the same expressionistic freedom, and indeed - an overall scruffiness which is thoroughly refreshing in these over-designed, digitally manipulated times.  Here though, Murillo also combines his painterly gestures with stencilled, screen printed and more carefully drawn motifs, as well as elements of scrawled text.  That he is a collagist too, is clear from this piling up of random, and possibly more symbolically freighted statements.  It's also made explicit in the means of physical construction often employed.  It transpires that many of his paintings are literally stitched together from separate sections of canvas - much as is the case with the draped pieces already encountered.

Oscar Murillo, 'Violent Amnesia' 'Oil, Oil Stick, Graphite & Screen Print On Canvas & Linen,
With Steel Rail, 2014-18 (Detail Below)

Oscar Murillo, 'Untitled', Oil On Canvas & Linen With Steel Rail, 2015-16 (Detail Below),
With: 'The Institute Of Reconciliation' (Detail)

The interrelatedness of all this is evident in the painting which again shares a title with the entire show, and which is constructed to hang, curtain-like from a steel pole.  Meanwhile, in a far corner, the (for me) most pleasing of Murillo's ragged canvas drapes ('untitled') obscured a window - content to revel in its pure grubby materiality, without carrying any imagery at all.  In such a fashion, Murillo gets from Rauschenberg to Eva Hesse in a single, effortless bound.  But if this weren't enough, his most dramatic intervention in this particular room - another iteration of 'The Institute of Reconciliation', proves his trans-media credentials, once and for all.  Here, a vast avalanche of seemingly filthy canvas sections, resembling discarded industrial tarpaulins, spilled across the floor.  The wall beyond,was defaced by a field of oily scuff marks - suggesting the canvas was dragged across it in the most rudimentary form of abstract image-transfer imaginable.  The inclusion of more burnt clay, corn, and coins here alludes to the already mentioned thematic underpinnings, but I'd have been more than content with it as a more ambiguously process-driven statement, to be perfectly honest.

Oscar Murillo, 'Surge', Oil, Oil Stick & Screen Print On Canvas & Linen, (2017-18)
With: 'The Institute Of Reconciliation' (Detail), 

Oscar Murillo, 'The Institute Of Reconciliation', Oil On Canvas, Coins, Burnt Corn & Clay,
2014- (Ongoing)

Indeed, if I have any criticism of Murillo's practice (or the small taste of it revealed in Cambridge), it is only that his seeming attempt to cover all bases, formally and conceptually, must inevitably fall a little flat eventually.  For me, this occurred next door, in the tiny St Peter's church.  The ever-expanding 'Institute..' continued here, featuring some pretty rudimentary papier mache figures, punctured by sections of metal ducting, and perched on yet more damaged church pews.  The accompanying notes reveal these to be reminiscent of yet more ritual sacrifice - in this case, the Colombian 'Mateo' effigies, traditionally burnt at New Year.  Murillo's intention with these, as with all his burning of clay, corn, and scattering of coinage, seems to be to comment on the exploitation of labour and destructiveness of consumption.  That's laudable enough, but again - I feel like the impressive formalist aspects of this multi-facetted installation somewhat overwhelm the socio-political content it purports to carry.  Ultimately though - who am I really, to criticise another, far more accomplished artist, for attempting to pack in too many things all at once? 

Oscar Murillo, 'Organisms Of All Countries Unite', Graphite, Oil Stick & Coloured Pencil On
Paper With Carbon Paper, 2016 (Details Below)

And that Oscar Murillo is actually able to cash most of the cheques he writes, was revealed in a couple of smaller spaces, upstairs at Kettle's Yard.  'Organisms From All Countries Unite', comprises four composite suites of meticulous drawings, over which are imposed abstract gestures in a far cruder hand.  The drawings, it transpires - are executed by another artist, commissioned to work from photographs taken by Murillo, to document the economic decline of the once-prosperous (in Soviet times) Azerbaijani village of Sheki.  The gestural defacement was then committed by Murillo - in a piece of disruptive collaboration of which I thoroughly approve.  It feels like a far more eloquent attempt to reconcile visual expressiveness with a socio-political theme somehow - perhaps because of the inclusion of explicit representational imagery, and the conflict between two authorial voices.

Oscar Murillo, 'Organisms Of All Countries Unite', Graphite, Oil Stick & Coloured Pencil On
Paper With Carbon Paper, 2016 (Detail Below)

Also upstairs, hung another collaborative statement, in the form of the mixed media piece, 'Frequencies'.  This represents an on-going project, in which Murillo encourages school students to carry-out free-associative drawings on pieces of canvas, wherever his international travels take him.  These are subsequently stitched together in the form of yet more stitched drapes - potentially giving voice to all the world's children, I suppose.  For such an ambitiously outward-facing, and engaged artist, that seems like a perfectly appropriate ambition.  And after all, if it's not an artist's job to cut creatively through all the barriers of inequality, misunderstanding, and isolationism, currently besetting us all - whose is it?  Oscar Murillo seems admirably up for the task.   

Oscar Murillo & International Students Aged 10-16, 'Frequencies', Mixed Media, 2015
(Part Of Long-Term Collaborative Project)

Oscar Murillo: 'Violent Amnesia', ran  9 April - 23 June 2019, at Kettle's Yard, University Of Cambridge, Castle Street, Cambridge, CB3 0AQ.

Oscar Murillo: 'Manifestation' runs until 26 July 2019, at David Zwirner, 24 Grafton Street, London, W1S 4EZ

Oh, You Know - Something About Framing My Shots, Or My Latest Posts, Or Fulfilling My Goals...

All Images: West Nottingham, April 2019

Much of the imagery on this Blog originates in the heart of one city or another.  At other times, the focus may be more on the suburbs.  But here, we're definitely at the very fringes of Nottingham - outside its western ring road, and right at the margin where development filters out into farmland.  

But, as others have pointed out, 'The Edgelands' are a distinct, liminal kind of territory, and just as rich in potential artistic stimuli, as the inner core of many cities.  Edgelands may be much less concentrated, frenetic, or super-heated than city centres, but they can be fascinatingly nuanced and ambiguous - often with a distinct poetry of their own.

Viewed in the right way, they can even conjure an environment in which the everyday and mundane start to feel intriguingly alien or mysteriously enchanted in some unexpected way.  This strange sector of interlocking geometry definitely felt that way, on the eerily still, and  humid day in April, when I came upon it.

Of course, if one takes a step back from all the Psychogeographic daydreaming, and thinks in purely visual terms once more, these images also provide an ideal opportunity to just indulge my love of linear geometry, with all its glorious, abstract potentiality.

It started me thinking about how, in formal or pictorial sense, a line is often just a notional boundary between two distinct portions of space, or between a space and a not-space, perhaps.  For two dimensional artists, lines are essentially a device for chopping up illusionistic space, rather than something actually perceived or definable, in the real world.  For a sculptor, however, they can become something tangible - literally delineating a portion of actual space, into which one might insert one's body, as well as one's imagination.  In a wholly found manner, that's also exactly what these goal frames are achieving - and with a pleasing complexity.

Of course, by photographing them - and presenting them via this most illusionistic of media, I am returning them to the realm of the purely pictorial.  It also occurs to me that, particularly in those three shots wholly without a background of sky or distant trees, you've pretty much got the history of Western picture-making, from Renaissance perspective, to Cubism, to geometric abstraction, playing out in a few dozen steel tubes and a patch of grass.

Back of the net...

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? 

Colour / Not Colour 9

Both Images: Central Nottingham, May 2019

It seems I've been resurrecting a few slightly neglected series on here, lately.  The images in this is post could easily fit into one of several familiar categories, including 'Yellow Things', 'Grey Things', 'Scaffolding', or 'Urban Geometry'.  All of those themes have recurred, in one form or another, at different times, over the last few years.  Ultimately though, it feels like the two images, captured only meters apart, in Nottingham, a few weeks back - best illustrate the idea of 'Colour' and 'Not Colour', played out in similarly abstracted subjects (albeit on two very different scales).  

I often tell myself not to be so predictable in my habitual selection of geometrically formal, picture-plane orientated, minimalist, quasi-abstract imagery - but then I walk past something like this, and off comes the lens cap, as if by involuntary reflex.  I guess the eye loves what the eye loves...

Anyway, he function of neutral 'Not Colours' in contextualising actual colours, is something all painters, in particular,  must come to terms with, sooner or later.  And it seems just as important a feature of the urban landscape - where drab masonry or utilitarian surface coatings often rub cheeks with saturated, synthetic (and often self-coloured) materials.  Certainly, both of these examples seem to typify the kind of artificial, industrial colours that interest me far more than traditional artist's pigments, these days.  And, of course - I'm always a sucker for Cadmium Yellow and Battleship Grey.

I often reflect how, in recent times, I've spent hundreds of hours staring at the bits of cities most people just pass by - and how I've sourced far more of my materials in the aisles of B&Q, than in any art materials supplier. 

Working Methods: 'This S(c)eptic Isle', 'Childish Things' 6

All Images: Work In Progress: 'Childish Things', Salvaged Trundle Toys, May 2019

I'd really thought I might be done with these crippled toy sculptures last year, not least - because they're pretty labour intensive, and I'm still struggling to find storage room for the first lot.  Plus, I genuinely hoped that the undeniably Brexity subtext behind much of the 'TSI' project might feel old hat by now.  

But, since when has making art (particularly of this kind) been about doing the sensible or practical thing?  And, as far as the second point goes, all I can say is "Fat Chance!"  The fact that what may have started as a petulant act of national self-harming, now feels symptomatic of a much more sinister, and intensifying, far-right zeitgeist - makes it seem all the more vital to take some account of the whole sorry situation.  Ultimately, externalising one's anxieties has to be healthier than internalising them - I think.  Trust me, if this all, one day, seems like so much irrelevant paranoia - and to have thus been a complete waste of time, no one will be more pleased than me.  

But, for now, as the weather gradually improves, and the day-lengths extend, I find myself once more, out in the back yard - with abrasive paper, dust mask, and cans of grey primer.  You just can't tell some people...

Mail Shots 8

Both Images: Stokes Croft, Bristol, April 2019

Mail slots have been pretty thin on the ground on here, of late - but there was no way I could leave these two little gems uncommemorated.

Bristol Brutal

Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Here's another short photo-essay from my recent Bristol dérive.  In this case, it features a series of architectural studies, of often-overlooked corners of the city - each stumbled upon, rather than sought-out, during my perambulations.

The Bristol Hotel, Narrow Quay, Bristol, April 2019

Anyone familiar with Bristol will know it's all too easy to be seduced by the Georgian, Regency and Victorian architectural styles, which still characterise much of the city - dating from the period of its spectacular mercantile expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries.  There's no denying that there's much to enjoy there, in terms of sheer visual (or atmospheric) environment.  But it's also important to remember that much of what now appears charming and quaint was built with the proceeds from massively exploitative colonial expansion, the trades in alcohol and tobacco, and most disturbingly - slavery.  Indeed, Bristol's dirty history as a major nexus of the slave trade is still commemorated in specific place names - not least Whiteladies Road, Blackboy Hill, and the various locations named after famed slave trader and so-called 'philanthropist' Edward Colston. 

Either way, Bristol has reinvented itself more than once since those days. Notably, it has  currently thrown-up numerous pockets of much more contemporary redevelopment -  often styled with the kind of sleek, almost hyper-real, minimalism beloved of late-stage Capitalism.  Such buildings often seem to incorporate highly reflective surfaces that seem to camouflage their real intent by throwing our own image back at us - or else the kind of curtain-walled transparency that might privilege the idea of transparency over any real insight into the interior workings of a specific institution.  Increasingly, there is almost a sense of architecture as a series of monumental screens - an analogue of the pocket-sized portals to the digital realm  we all now routinely carry.

Millennium Square, Cannon's Marsh, Bristol, April 2019

In Bristol, one such notable example would be the Millennium Square complex.  Nominally an attempt to re-imagine the old quayside hinterland of Canon's Marsh, as an 'exciting' public space, there's a strangely alienating Science Fiction quality at work here, with its huge mirrored sphere, geometric reflecting ponds, and purpose-built facades (suggesting the clean machine ethic of racked server towers).  Even those original dockside buildings that remain have been spruced up to become the carriers of blandly inspirational texts, or to incorporate an actual large video screen.

It occurs to me that the two most overtly favoured forms of architectural expressions at work in contemporary Bristol thus appear to reflect the city's commercial drive across the centuries, over any more civic aspirations.  This is as true of the rapacious sea-faring mercantilism evoked in the picturesque legacy of heritage Bristol, as it is of the race to monetise services and, above all - information, that informs its most recent manifestations.   

Freemantle Square, Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Reflecting (quite literally, in certain cases) on all of this, is fascinating, but there's another, perhaps less expected Bristol too - as demonstrated by most of these images.  This is the often arbitrary intervention of certain jarring elements of twentieth-century Modernism, or else - a kind of supremely quotidian functionalism, into the mix.  Thus, I could wander through picturesque Cotham, arriving at the charming (and personally nostalgic) Freemantle Square, only to turn a corner, and be suddenly confronted by a series of startlingly antithetical blocks of tawdry Brutalist public housing.  Clinging to the edge of Kingsdown, as it descends to Stokes Croft below, these feel like ramparts, from which one might survey wide tracts of the city as if from a disconnected, parallel timescale.  They're like a point of chronological fracture, or alternative history - just as they represent a rupture in physical and architectural space.

Clifton, Bristol, April 2019

Elsewhere, I found found myself pausing, on the steep climb from historic Park Street - and up to Clifton (that pinnacle of old, moneyed Bristol), only to find myself peering through concrete slats into a basement car-park so baldly functional as to seem totally decontextualised - like a pocket of parallel reality, or a portal through which one might leave the world outside behind.  A little further, a battered steel box, aspirated noisily through the slatted grille occupying its front face.  It was unexplained by its surroundings, and ignored by all other passers-by, and I'm left wondering exactly what kind of hidden subterranean realm might by served by such a ventilation duct.

Clifton, Bristol, April 2019

High Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Another, similar, basement space was to be observed, screened behind security gates at High Kingsdown.  This is part of a self-contained realm of modernist estate housing, inserted into the older and more organic surrounding neighbourhood, in another incidence of arresting architectural juxtaposition.  Possibly planned to provide staff housing for the nearby hospital (I'm guessing), the stylistic contrast with its neighbouring areas is so marked as to suggest it might even be some kind of independent micro-state.  I passed through freely, in the event - but expected to be challenged for my papers at any moment.   

Sir James Barton, Roundabout, Bristol, April 2019

Overlooking the rim of 'The Bearpit' at St James Barton Roundabout (itself, a whole other story - almost resembling a kind of post-apocalyptic anarcho-shanty town, these days), I found a grid of shabby mirrored windows in whose bleak signage, the commercial property boom seems to have been reduced to a kind of panicky fire sale. Nearby, a disability access lift has been inserted into a narrow aperture - resembling nothing so much as some kind of transporter unit - from which one might be beamed onto to the surface of a different planet altogether.  However, the broken bottle shards, alongside, and clearly compromised 'safety' barrier, are hardly reassuring - a situation unalleviated  by a few runs of hazard tape, inexpertly applied to the lift itself.  Would one's scrambled atoms ever be successfully reassembled in their correct configuration by such a dubious-looking unit? - we might ask (Scotty).

Sir James Barton Roundabout, Bristol, April 2019

Perhaps the most dramatic juxtaposition of all comes in the form of The Bristol Hotel & Conference Centre.  It's a building I've always found thrilling in its breathtaking incongruity.  With historic Queen's Square to one side, and the repurposed industrial archeology of the old Floating Harbour, to the other - one can only stand before its stark, pre-cast grids, and the even more dramatic latticework of its carpark facade, and marvel at the misguided conviction of its architects - that theirs' was the real future to build.

Of course, such buildings are generally regarded as little more than a pernicious blight, these days.  It's amazing just how many have already been swept away around the country, and I can only assume this one survives because it's prime city centre location has caused the hotel it houses to thrive as a business.

The Bristol Hotel, Narrow Quay, Bristol, April 2019

Much has been written about how the Modernism of the post-war twentieth century, and the brief moment of social(ist) consensus it represents, now feels indicative of a kind of future that never was.  Such ideas have spawned much of the recent pop-cultural re-imagining of the idea of Hauntology, as well as the awakening of a kind of alt-heritage impulse amongst Leftists, the self-consciously design savvy, and those inclined to embrace irony, or contrarianism.  But I think it would be disingenuous not to allow that there's probably a significant element of good old fashioned nostalgia at play too.  For some of us, of a certain vintage, such buildings represent a world we were born into - one whose naive Utopianism might have suggested the beginning of a more idealistic age, but which now seems, instead, to mark an end to innocence altogether.

If the main impulse behind my little West-Country excursion was a degree of autobiographical reprocessing (as I think it was), the meditations above are really only part of a more personal emotional journey.  They definitely represent certain familiar ideas that I've connected with in different cities, over recent years.  But, perhaps because of the even more dramatic architectural juxtapositions at play in Bristol, they seemed to swim into even sharper focus at various points during my brief stay.  Also, whatever cod-philosophy I might dress it all up in, you already know how much I love to photograph those straight edges and formal geometries, as well as all that delicious bleakness  - don't you?