IMAGES

STATEMENT

These works juxtapose imagery from films with contemporary images from the locations where the films were made.*

In Whistledown and The Optimists the theme linking both films is the death of childhood and the regulation of childish imagining.

In Whisltle Down The Wind a group of children befriend an escaped murderer who they believe to be Jesus. Their disillusionment when the truth is revealed marks their passage into adulthood. A similar event occurs in the Optimist of Nine Elms where two children are forced to abandon a friendship with an eccentric street entertainer who arouses the suspicion of other adults.

The original films present a commonplace and mythical account of childhood. In my work these myths collide with the traces of the real places where the myths were made.

These works are concerned with the relationship between identity formed as a result of exposure to fictive information, and that formed as a result of lives lived in real places

Whistle Down The Wind was filmed in my home town, when I was a child. I use the stills as substitutes for what I have forgotten about that time. They are surrogate memories.

Hue City uses extracts from the screenplay of the film Full Metal Jacket alongside photographs from one of the locations - the now demolished Beckton Gas Works in London.

*Whistle Down the Wind (Dir. Brian Forbes)
The Optimists of Nine Elms (Dir. Anthony Simmons)
Full Metal Jacket (Dir Stanley Kubrik)

CURRICULUM VITAE

February 19 1989

Thought in retreat. Its feelers recoil as the nature of the world becomes apparent. The mind shrinks to a seed and nerves and sinews are dragged into the implosion.

March 14 1989

In 1966 nuns told us there was sin. Stains, just like dirt, but impermeable, upon the white souls we were born with. Later I watched clouds race past the full moon in a black sky and wondered how dirty I was.

June 13 1989

Aesthetic. The transformation of violence and decay into nuance.

July 2 1989

Fragments of the past, excised or cherished and used to stitch together identity.

June 23 1989

The normality we're constructing for her is a form of torture. Even compassion is delivered in blows, and the drugs we prescribe ease our pain. All she has is gentleness, she can't use that as a weapon so she cuts herself with the bread knife.

July 7 1990

In the new millennium love will evolve into a feeling more compatible with the free market.

January 1991

The morality of war seeps into everyday life.

February 1991

We do as we're told and believe we're doing what we want.

April 10 1991

There is a world, but it is not the echo of our thoughts. Our reactions to it do not correspond to the facts and the result is a freezing wind of psychosis that blows us into our own nightmares.
Having got hold of the wrong end of the stick, we use it to beat reality into a shape that corresponds to our fictions.

April 13 1991

Time to begin, to stop hauling memory into each day so that the day is full of the past and you can't move for it.

June 19 1997

If the view is screened you'll compensate for the missing distance by projecting depth onto the screen. The illusion of possibility is the substitute for the space from which you have been cordoned off.

June 23 1997

"As soon as you think it - it's gone." -DW

January 6 2000

The grapes were not clearly priced. She was in her eighties. When she got to the checkout the cashier warned her that they were expensive. They were.
She paid because she didn't want to be embarrassed. She looked as though she had hardly any money, and she looked as though she couldn't have imagined that grapes could cost so much.

January 9 2000

Sky 1. Harm is a pollutant. The harmed let out silent cries, traces of pain that rise into the atmosphere and scatter over the roof of the sky. Thickening over the years to the point where the invisible layer reaches our mouths. Breathing in the darkened air, it becomes impossible to act innocently.

November 27 2000

Sky 2. Looking up at the sky, the gaze disturbs molecules in the gasses forming the skin of the atmosphere. These disturbances are perceptible by the human eye as fleeting evanescence. Eventually, sight and empathy will evolve to the extent that it will be possible to know - by reading the lights in the flickering atmosphere - who is looking at the sky at any one time, (and what they are thinking).

December 2003

Touch Screen .The flickering images take on flesh, and the body becomes a beam of electrons. What you do has less to do with you than what you watch, and touch terminates in the nerve endings on the surface of the skin.