Last year I made a book. As often happens with a creative undertaking, it has taken some time and distance to work out how I feel about it, especially as it is formed from very personal experiences. It continues my photographic work at the periphery of the city, exploring that space just beyond the urban, but not yet rural. It also explores my own personal boundaries, made during a time of huge change in my life, you might say a midlife crisis of sorts. As a wise friend pointed out to me, according to the Oxford English Dictionary the original meaning of crisis is “a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent; a turning point”. This book is me trying to make sense of that turning point; exploring what I feel about being in my fifties, being queer in my fifties, how I feel about my ageing body, how others feel about my ageing body, how I feel about how others feel about my ageing body! Walking (using my ageing body) is central to how I start my creati
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 2021. I didn’t leave my p