2C-BN2BS, 2024
My London, FT Weekend x Photo London.
When I was a child, we would travel from Slough into London to visit family. Driving along the Hammersmith flyover, I would look out for the giant boat-shaped building. I was blown away by the scale. Back home, I felt I could almost see the glass towers glistening from a distance. Now I know that enormous building as The Ark, a block of offices.When I finally arrived in the capital, I got an internship, endlessly archiving images from magazines and arranging taxis to photography studios. I saw the gap between my fantasy of London and real life. I began to pay attention to the surfaces of the city, to the glossy facades of the skyscrapers, spreading from Vauxhall to Canary Wharf, which had so impressed me.In making this commission, I thought a lot about the philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s 1974 book The Production of Space, and the way capitalism shapes space in London. I made images of the city’s architecture and used industrial processes like laser cutting and UV printing to make them into a modular sculpture.The pieces form a house of cards-style structure, beautiful but brittle. Like the glass buildings that seemed to glimmer back at me as a child, light bounces off the images of metal and glass. London can feel so solid, almost a part of the natural world. In this work, I attempted to make the unseen processes of production visible.
FT Weekend Magazine, May 4/5 2024, p,8.