Leadenhall Market, City of London Artist-in-Residence project 2022
Someone in a pub, in London, dozed off for a few moments & during that time an ancient God came back. Just a glitch in the space time grid. A God released by a mortal who briefly let their guard down. Human brains are the only places those ancient Gods can live now - we no longer believe they exist anywhere else externally, or that they are available to us. The God that was uncorked was Baccus, & in his few moments of freedom he crossed the Leadenhall Market. A short journey, but one that affected several different people.
This idea was explored by James Hudson during his 2022 residency. Using B&W film photographs taken at the market & a fictional text, he produced 30 large prints, that were displayed on site, & a 40 page zine.
Bacchus (also known as Dionysus) was the God of wine, vegetation, fertility, festivity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy & theatre. A Roman mosaic of Bacchus riding a tiger was discovered in London during building work close to the site of the Leadenhall Market. The surviving mosaic pieces were transferred to The British Museum in 1880.
James Hudson is an artist making fictional work that combines original photography, text & collage. Initially he photographed BMX & Skateboard culture & later became a commercial photographer. Drawn to literature, film photography’s unpredictability & how B&W images close typography & illustration’s visual gaps, he then developed an art practice. For his M.A. he extended Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished 1787 story ‘The Cave of Fancy’ into a photo-text novel. He has received commissions from Ffotogallery & the Welsh Assembly, exhibited at the Format & Diffusion festivals, completed residencies for the Ashmolean Museum, The Dee Valley & Leadenhall Market in London. He is currently producing a project in serval international ‘chapters’ about migration, crypto-currency & our evolution into ‘digital' humans. Inspiration comes from literature, history & illustration, particularly work with a surrealist & gothic flavour. His narratives often have gaps for readers to fill in & are usually printed as B&W zines.