Pur Suit Curve
Fashion zine for Jesse Thomas' experimental clothing. @jessethomas is a skateboarder who, alongside being on @skateboardgb, decided to make slashed sweat pants and jackets inspired by his Origami (more details about that below). We arranged to photograph the clothes in Bristol and, whilst out on the street, bumped into @anettanvv who also then got involved. The narrative of the project began at that moment and was completed in the studio later once all the photographs had been processed and I was able to see what we had all been doing.
Digital. Human. Migration: Newport
About the digital value of humans. Included refugee workshops in Newport.
Vale Voice
Residency project in the Dee Valley exploring paradolia & panpsychism.
Nothing To Worry About
Zine exploring urban alienation, fear of terrorism, suicide and surveillance.
Volution
Project for the Many Voices, One Nation commission.
Reunification
Collage of original images and text inspired by the reunification of Germany.
Life in the Arthaus
A 1930s theatre house, a dance hall, an artists’ studio and a gallery – the Arthaus building in Hackney, London has a rich heritage as a space filled with people and their creations. In 2019 the building was transformed into a purpose-built mixed-use development by Lynas Smith Architects, and is now home to restaurants, a yoga studio, commercial office space, private apartments and gardens. Yet mixed-use developments such as this are a new phenomenon to emerge from the 21st century. Here, home and work are housed side by side – nestled under the same roof in a way that is unique to the relatively recent history of how we live.
The photography project started as Lynas Smith moved out of one of the office spaces to a larger office nearby.
The Architecture of Power
Photographs for a book about power, the masons, architecture and the history of London.
@ a poetry brothel
Hand bound, printed zine with laser cut sections.
The Cave of Fancy
Evolution of an unfinished Mary Wollstonecraft story into a new photo-text novel.
3 Muses
Practice, Memory and Song. Fashion project.
Skate Park Life
The first time I went to a skatepark was in the early 80’s. It was next to a pig slaughter house on Strawberry Road in my home town of Retford in Nottinghamshire. The skatepark had been built some years earlier at the tail end of the 70’s, no doubt after much local council debate and whose completion coincided perfectly with the death of the first skateboarding craze in the UK.
As a skatepark it was not very good, for a 13 year old boy it was a unique and exciting place.This was not somewhere that your parents had been to, it was not an organised, recognised sports facility like a tennis court or a football pitch. Retford skatepark was the kind of place you went to smoke, a place to smash bottles and to fight. It was a bit rough and I do not ever remember being there on my own.
As we got better at doing tricks on our bikes the Strawberry Road skatepark started to feel a bit limiting. The constant sweeping up of glass and the noise and smell of the pigs, were never really endearing features of the place and I went there less and less. We built our own ramp in the garden, started to enter competitions and began to travel to bigger and better skateparks.
In the early 90’s I started taking photographs seriously and contributing them to specialist skateboard and bmx magazines but it was always the trick, or the rider, that was the focus of my pictures.The overall environment of the skatepark was not really of interest to me at the time, I just took them for granted.
Riding my bmx and taking pictures for magazines eventually stopped and I got involved in other work. Occasionally I would end up in a skatepark and sometimes borrow a bike or a board and have a go. In 2003 I started riding my bike again a little more seriously. I was again regularly in skatepark environments but I looked at them in a different way now: the tricks and the riders were not the only thing that mattered. My interest was now much broader and I started to photograph it in a different way. No longer ignoring the people who were just hanging around and now looking at the whole space. I finally saw skateparks as places people grow up and not just place where they do tricks.
My renewed interest in riding my bike soon dissolved, not so much the physical strain but the fact that I knew it could never feel as good as the times I had spent riding and growing up in skateparks.
This collection of pictures is from skateparks during an regularly interrupted period between the years 1988 and 2008.
James Hudson
Some death I have known
Zine of fading epitaphs.
London
A visual response to William Blakes' 18th century poem.
Three Encounters
Semi-fictional words and images.
Change in Form
Metamorphosis in the Ashmolean Museum.