Domestic Landscape was an exploration of private urban environments. These investigations have taken the form of audio works, installations, photographs and lithographic prints.
Shadowscape: Over a few months, I taped litho plates directly to walls or hung them from curtains to record shadows in a room on bright sunny days. The resulting images are grainy and inexact – the print altering slightly each time the plate is inked up, due to the inaccurate way of producing the image. The horizontal arrangement of prints, whilst drawn from reality, have been combined to create a semi-imaginary landscape of shadows.
Interior: photographic series focusing on smaller areas of an interior location – a light fitting, a window, a temporary patch of light on a wall. They are composed and shot, using carefully researched transparency film. By using old medium format cameras, the exposures take several minutes to set up and shot. The resulting images are as much a meditation on a particular type of photography as they are of the locations they profess to document.
Document: 1980s carpet from the living room of a Victorian terrace house, hung from a wall. Nothing has been done to the carpet, other than removing it from its intended location and re-presenting it on the wall of a gallery. It exists as a 1:1 scale map – cut to the shape of the Victorian terrace front room it came from: the bay window, the fireplace and doorframe are clearly identifiable in the outline. Over twenty years’ worth of use has left indentations from furniture and worn patches from the house’s inhabitants’ continuous walking over the same areas. This amassed marks upon the carpet’s surface displays the passage of time not as a linear structure but as a gradual and cumulative layering. Like the house itself, it does not exist in one specific, ‘authentic’ period of time, but rather it exists through time. There is an acknowledgement of everyday British-ness about it – it comes from a specific location, yet its generic shape typifies domestic architecture throughout the country.
Empty House: 4 channel audio work // 9 mins. This piece is created from four simultaneous ambient recordings of different rooms in an empty house. The recordings consist of general background noise, exterior sounds and areas of silence, edited so as to give an acoustic feeling of domestic ‘indoors-ness’. The work is presented as a four speaker installation.